Locking children into failing schools just wasn’t enough. Now, we’re locking up mothers for trying to send their kids to better schools.

This is madness. A mother has been sent to jail for lying about her residence because she was attempting to send her kids to a better school district.

If you ask me, the union thugs and their cohorts in Congress and state legislatures around the country should be the ones facing time for locking children into failing schools.

Time Magazine reports:

Much of the poltical rhetoric on education reform has centered on the ability of parents to send their children to better schools, particularly in situations where they were forced to send them to schools that were failing. But in the case of Kelley Williams-Bolar, her desire to get her children better educational placement landed her in jail, and may well derail her aspirations of becoming a teacher herself.

Williams-Bolar, 40, and her two children live in housing projects in Akron, Ohio. For two years, she sent them to school in the Copley-Fairlawn district, where her father lived, because it was a safer environment — the high crime rate in her area drove her decision. The suburban school district hired a private investigator to find their residential records and it turned out she listed the children as living in that district, although they actually stayed with her.

Technically, that qualifies as a felony since she falsified records, and Judge Patricia Cosgrove sentenced her to two concurrent five-year prison sentences. She suspended the sentence, though, in favor of a 10-day jail sentence, 80 hours of community service and three years probation. She had been working as a teaching assistant for special needs children and earning a teaching degree, but since she is now a convicted felon, under Ohio law she cannot earn that degree.

Our education system in this country is disgraceful.

And don’t expect help from the Obama administration despite the President’s remarks during the SOTU about making our schools more competitive. Remember two years ago, sat by and Congress revoked Opportunity Scholarships for 216 students in Washington D.C, according to the Washington Times.

Even Joe Lieberman called it “the civil rights issue” of our time. Speaker John Boehner and Lieberman introduced legislation just yesterday to return the school voucher program to D.C.

So instead of putting mothers in jail maybe we should let them send their children to a decent school. Crazy idea, I know.