Why should University students bother voting May 17 for local school funding Measure 20-182? The majority of you don’t have kids in school. Your own classes won’t be overcrowded if the measure fails. University teachers and school days aren’t threatened the way K-12s are, right?
True, technically. But those battling over this measure have radically different education agendas, and you might want to choose political bedfellows carefully on this one.
If you vote “Yes,” you join parents, education advocates and kids who believe in public education and want to stave off the worst cuts slated for 2011-12. The measure retains 100 otherwise laid-off teachers — preventing the addition of 4-7 kids per class in K-12 — and restores lost school days. It’s not a solution to the overall funding crisis, but it buys us time. It’s temporary, modest and won’t affect you unless you make more than $11,000/year.
If you vote “No,” or don’t bother to vote, you cozy up to Americans for Prosperity, the national right-wing Tea Party affiliate whose Eugene chapter named itself Citizens for Jobs and Schools to oppose this measure. Funded by the mega-rich Koch brothers (who aren’t from Oregon), AFP isn’t just anti-tax, they’re anti-public education. AFP promotes the Kochs’ corporate agenda of unregulated capitalism and works to destroy unions, health care programs, NPR, NEA, Planned Parenthood, consumer and environmental laws, and, yes, public education — which, by the way, includes the Oregon University System. In AFP’s perfect world of privatized education, you’d pay your own way. 100 percent. That translates to no student aid, no federal research grants and no state funding.
As a parent of two children in 4J schools, I’m asking University students to vote “Yes” on Measure 20-182. Choose whatever reason you like ­— self-interest, alarm at the right-wing agenda of the measure’s opponents, or conviction that schools should be adequately funded — but please mail in your ballot.
And if you believe you can’t make a difference, remember it was the youth vote that helped Obama outdistance McCain in 2008.
Mary DeMocker
Eugene resident