Kentucky’s new school voucher law is segregation by another name
To understand the current dynamics of our country, one must know our history. The current Republican Party is not the Republican Party of Lincoln, who saved the nation. That Republican Party was usurped by southerners who were and remain racist and segregationist. Lincoln was not an abolitionist, but he emancipated the slaves in the South as part of his efforts to save the nation. The Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in states that had seceded from the nation. The slaves in the border states, the north, and the west were freed later.
After Lincoln’s Republican Party was stolen by southern racists, they began to fight Reconstruction, integration, the Civil Rights Act and the universal right to vote. In the 1960’s, the new Republicans controlled parishes near New Orleans that passed legislation to fight integration due to the decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring that segregated education was not equal education. The Louisiana legislation built private schools, closed public schools, granted taxpayer funded vouchers so white children could attend private schools. Some public schools were left open but they were underfunded and attended by the black children and the poor whites. Sound familiar?
In 2021, the non-Lincoln Republican controlled Kentucky General Assembly adopted the Louisiana plan by passing HB 563. This new law will be harmful to public education and all of our children. Students may choose what school they will attend outside their home districts, thus shifting state funds from one district to another. Further, it starts with $25 million in public funds to pay scholarships/vouchers to private schools for students who qualify. The Louisiana plan was to keep segregation by funding private schools.
The 2022 Kentucky General Assembly will expand their scholarship program to all school districts statewide for private schools. This plan will weaken all public schools and devastate poor districts. The clear purpose of the plan is to defeat integration in the large urban areas and to assure that chosen white children do not have to attend a public school with black, Asian, Hispanic, disabled children or children of different persuasions. Please consider this and you will be unable to refute the fact that this is clearly discriminatory and racist.
I am a registered Republican, not someone with a liberal agenda, but we must ask why are we destroying our public school system when we have the funds for the first time to upgrade it and upgrade the education for our children?
David O. Smith lives in Corbin.
