Guy Ciarrocchi: Bribing poor families to stay in schools that don’t work!

Yes, the headline is correct. Another public school district is bribing poor families to transfer back to the very schools that they transferred the children from.

It’s outrageous, unethical, immoral and ought to be illegal — if it isn’t already.

When I saw the news article, I stopped another column that I was writing. This is even more outrageous than what I was writing about, because this is about our children. They’re taking advantage of children — and poor and working class families. And this is yet another time when the education establishment shows that their only concern is money and power. For far too many, it has nothing to do with the education, safety, or welfare of our students.

Nothing.

The Westmont-Hilltop School District (WHSD) in Cambria County is paying $2000 per family when students in their community leave a cyber charter school and return to the WHSD. Remember, by definition, all children enrolled in cyber schools are there because their parents or guardians chose for them to enroll there — because the local school district school is failing, or is unsafe, or is otherwise just not working for them.

In case you were wondering how much the education swamp hated every type of school choice — hated parents having choices — the education-industrial-complex is making it crystal clear. The teachers union, the school boards, and the other adults who get power and money off of our kids will stop at nothing.  

They spend millions of our tax dollars lobbying and advertising against every form of education choice — anything that empowers parents to find a more fit school for their child: charter schools, home schooling, tax credits, scholarships, vouchers and cyber schools. They use the school district’s payroll department to collect teacher’s contributions to their PACs — spending millions supporting their toadies and working to defeat any legislator who supports any type of school choice.

Now, Westmont-Hilltop is the latest to hit a new low: bribing parents. They’re using tax dollars to bribe parents to undo their school choice — to bribe them to leave the cyber school that they chose to return to the WHSD school they fled. The school that was not working for their children.

Let me put a finer point on it. It’s not only unethical — and possibly illegal — it’s immoral. They’re bribing poor families. Some of the families that rejected the WHSD schools probably could afford Catholic or other private schools. But many of the cyber children are the ones who can’t afford parochial or private schools, even with scholarships and financial aid.

Plus, allow me to make a finer point: upper class families are not so cash-strapped that they’d feel tempted — even compelled — to accept money to switch schools. In other words, it’s unlikely that you’d see this type of unethical bribery program in Radnor or Lower Merion. (I hope.)

In the WHSD, their own data states that 47 percent of their students are “economically disadvantaged” according to government classifications. This makes a bad policy even more unethical.

My fear is that it will spread to Chester-Upland, Coatesville, Reading, or Philadelphia — home to the largest group of cyber students by far. They may prevail upon poor and working class families who need cash to pay the bills. 

How callous. How cynical. How self-serving.

As I’ve written in the past, cyber students only get about 68 percent of the funding that a traditional local school district student gets. And…the remaining 32 percent stays with the local district—the people not educating the student. 

But, the education swamp wants more — they always want more money. They never have enough money.

You may ask: why do I care? I live in Chester County? Well, aside from the WHSD program being morally repugnant and anti-student, about 36 percent of the WHSD funding comes from state funding. So, folks in Chester County — and every county in our state — are helping to underwrite this bribery.

And, clearly the WHSD believes that in the long-term bribing families helps their bottom-line. They want 100 percent of the students’ funding — not satisfied with getting 32 percent to do nothing.

Yet, they suggest that the policy is driven by their “need” of money; but, it isn’t. It’s not about “enough” money: it’s about more money.

The WHSD has nearly $8 million in cash reserves — about 30 percent of their annual budget. Sitting in the bank. Yet cyber student “spending” accounts for just over three percent of their budget. Plus, as the above news article mentions, they just bought a plot of land near their local high school.

They have tons of cash. They just bought a big plot of land. They don’t “need” the cyber students to return: they want them back.

The education swamp hates competition and wants all the money — and then some.

Their superintendent (Thomas Mitchell) justified this new taxpayer-funded bribery program: “We need to be more entrepreneurial about how we attract students back to our school district.”

Try listening to parents. Try educating kids. Try thinking about the students — and not the education swamp.

Guy Ciarrocchi is a Senior Fellow with the Commonwealth Foundation and is a board member of Pennsylvania Families for Education Choice (PaEdChoice.org). He writes for Broad + Liberty and RealClear Pennsylvania. Follow Guy at @PaSuburbsGuy.