My students deserve better!

NEA Today, Oct 1998

About 15 million students attend schools unfit for quality learning. This November, will you remember?

Susan Pierce counts herself as lucky. The school where she teaches, Armuchee Elementary, is just five years old. The classrooms are modern and wellequipped. There's no better school in all of Floyd County in northwest Georgia.

And that, unfortunately, is the problem-and the reason why Susan Pierce's students aren't nearly as lucky as their teacher. The county schools most of them will attend, after Armuchee Elementary, are old and overcrowded.

One of Floyd County's middle schools, for instance, is 45 years old, and space is incredibly tight. Education activists believe it should have been replaced years ago.

At the high school level, the story is not much better. Many of the county's high school students spend part of every day in portable classrooms.

Susan Pierce's Floyd County students, sadly, face harsh school building realities that are in no way atypical, either in Georgia or in the United States as a whole.

In Georgia, one out of every four schools has a crumbling roof (for nationwide figures, see page 6), according to statistics compiled by the U.S. General Accounting Office. Nearly four out of 10 lack enough power outlets and wiring to accommodate computers in the classroom.

Overall, nearly three out of every five schools in the United States have at least one major building feature in disrepair, says the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Last March, these engineers analyzed and graded every element of America's basic social infrastructure, from wastewater systems and roads to mass transit and bridges. They gave only one infrastructure element a grade of F: America's schools.

Susan Pierce would like to see all the old and outdated school buildings in Floyd County renovated before her current students leave Armuchee Elementary. But there are no plans afoot to make these speedy renovations. The district simply doesn't have the money.

That's why Pierce's ears perked up last April when she heard about legislation pending in Congress designed to help school districts just like hers. The legislation, the NEA-backed Public School Modernization Act, would have set aside 22 billion federal dollars for zero-interest school modernization bonds.

Of that $22 billion, nearly $500 million would have been set aside for school districts in Georgia.

That sounded like a great idea to Pierce. So she did what all good American citizens are supposed to do. She contacted Congress and urged her senator, Paul Coverdell, to support the Public School Modernization Act.

Pierce wasn't alone. Late last spring, all across America, NEA members wrote, called, and E-mailed their representatives and senators on Capitol Hill to urge support for the School Modernization Act. Some members of Congress listened. Others like Senator Coverdell from Georgia didn't.

In fact, Coverdell was far more interested in creating tax breaks for private school tuition than modernizing public schools. He spent his spring pushing an "education savings account" proposal that would have meant tens of millions of dollars in tax savings for wealthy families with kids in private school.

On April 21, about a week after Susan Pierce urged Senator Coverdell to help modernize schools like hers, the Senate took its first key vote on the NEA-backed school modernization legislation.

The vote came on an amendment that Senator Carol Moseley-Braun from Illinois introduced on Coverdell's bill to subsidize private schools. MoseleyBraun's bill would have axed the private school subsidies and added $22 billion for public school modernization.

Coverdell and his Senate allies moved to table the Moseley-Braun amendment. Their motion passed, by a 56-42 margin, and school modernization was defeated.

A month later, the Senate schoolmodernizers tried again. Senator Moseley-Braun tried to add onto a budget bill an amendment that would have provided just $5 billion to help schools modernize old buildings.

Senator Coverdell voted no, as did a majority of his Senate colleagues.

The immediate result of that vote? No federal help this year for modernizing the schools in Floyd County, Georgia. And that, says Susan Pierce, means more years of lost learning opportunities.

"My senator, Paul Coverdell, feels it's more important to fund private schools with public funds than to improve public schools," says Pierce. "That's scary"

The good news? Pierce's senator is up for election this fall, as are many of his colleagues who'd rather subsidize private schools than help public schools modernize.

"Right now," points out Dale Lestina, NEA's top lobbyist on Capitol Hill, "the crowd that wants to funnel tax dollars into private schools actually has a majority in Congress. If it weren't for the Presidential veto power, they'd have their way."

But Presidential vetoes, Lestina points out, can't pass good legislation like the Public School Modernization Act. Vetoes can only stop bad legislation.

"That's why it's so important for NEA members to cast informed ballots this November," says Lestina. "We need to let lawmakers like Senator Coverdell know that we're watching-and voting."