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.
January 28, 2011 at 7:14 pm
All the more reason to dismantle the public school system and send kids to private school or homeschool.
January 29, 2011 at 2:34 am
Some laws should be resisted. This is not one of them. The requirement that students attending a public school district live within the district is not unreasonable, it's not an undue burden.
The mother must have had to commit multiple incidents of falsification of information. Laws against falsifying information on government documents are not unjust or unreasonable.
I see nothing about this that "should be resisted" or that is unjust.
The problem is with her local school, not the laws she violated. The local school being bad does not justify her actions.
January 29, 2011 at 3:24 am
The government should not be in the business of telling her, or anyone else, where they can or cannot send their children to school. That's where the core of the problem lies.
I would remind everyone that "free, universal public education" is one of the demands of the Communist Manifesto. Sounds great, but in practice it doesn't work out quite so well.
January 29, 2011 at 5:47 am
"The local school being bad does not justify her actions."
Yes, it does. Mothers do the best they can to care for their children, including break lousy laws to protect them.
Some laws should be broken, because some laws are crappy.
January 29, 2011 at 6:18 am
"The requirement that students attending a public school district live within the district is not unreasonable, it's not an undue burden."
The new laws threatening to shut down low performance schools kind of blows this argument out of the water. It would seem that many schools are an undue burden.
January 29, 2011 at 3:49 pm
She was jailed for falsification of records, not for trying to send her kids to a better school. That's like saying an illegal immigrant was arrested for trying to feed his family. It's pretty rich seeing conservative bloggers get bent out of shape over this, almost as good as so-called pro-life "constitutionalists" trying to tweak the 14th amendment to deny citizenship to babies born to parents who are non-citizens…
January 29, 2011 at 7:32 pm
David,
Can you really not tell the difference between a national boundary and a school district? Are you that oblivious to the criticism of mandatory education and a lack of school choice?
January 29, 2011 at 9:06 pm
So much for subsidiarity as a fundamental principle, huh? I think this exposes pretty clearly that calls for "subsidiarity" are usually just attacks at government doing anything at any level. It is the same old story: it is the poor who wish good government, for the rich do not wish to be governed.