This is an opinion cartoon.

Kay Ivey and Alabama GOP lawmakers have a stealthy new name for promoting resegregation and white flight from public schools.

From his column – Whites will soon be a minority in Ala. schools, so state may pay students to leave – al.com – John Archibald writes:

“And here we go again.

“Because flight has a new name, a new engine: School choice.

“Gov. Kay Ivey and assorted lawmakers unveiled a bill that will designate $100 million in state money to pull from the public schools and hand it – in increments of up to $7,000 in tax credits per student – to those who would like to fly.”

“To go to religious schools.

“To private schools.

“To schools that might seem better than those left behind, but have no way to prove it.

“Alabama leaders want to take your money and hand it – separation of church and state be damned – to church schools and other institutions that don’t have to follow state standards, that don’t have to take the same standardized tests, that are almost impossible to compare to public schools.”

To paraphrase Josh Moon, columnist for the Alabama Political Reporter: This school choice legislation will “crush public school teachers and this state’s most at-risk kids.”

Excerpts from Moon’s column:

“To be clear, this is a bill that provides a $7,000-per-student slush fund – up to $100 million annually for now and who knows how much more later – to private, typically religious-based organizations, many of which were built with the specific business plan of keeping Jim Crow segregation alive and well and still have the racial makeup to show for it, with little to no oversight, no public accountability and hardly any checks to ensure my tax dollars are being spent responsibly.

“But even worse – and yeah, I know it’s hard to get worse than what I’ve described above, but that’s how bad this plan is – it will cripple public schools in our most impoverished counties by sucking away funding from already underfunded schools, and all the while it will shut out of the program the very students it claims to want to help.

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“The “CHOOSE” program provides $7,000 annually for a student to attend a private school. The average tuition cost of private schools in Alabama is more than $8,200 per year, according to the Education Data Initiative and Private School Review.

“Those tuition costs typically don’t include lunches, so tough luck, free and reduced lunch kids. And it never includes transportation costs. They also rarely include a variety of fees for various programs – some totaling into the thousands annually – and sometimes don’t include all textbooks.”

Read all of Moon’s column here

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JD Crowe is the cartoonist for Alabama Media Group and AL.com. He won the RFK Human Rights Award for Editorial Cartoons in 2020. In 2018, he was awarded the Rex Babin Memorial Award for local and state cartoons by the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. Follow JD on Facebook, Twitter @Crowejam and Instagram @JDCrowepix. Give him a holler @[email protected].

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