Today’s youth doesn’t have it easy. They’ll probably be in debt forever thanks to shelling out $200,000 for college, which they couldn’t pay for at the time because they were working unpaid internships. When they graduate, jobs will be scarce and will probably barely cover basic expenses. The American dream? They can watch from afar as their Norwegian counterparts achieve it.
So, the least we can do is make sure a decent public education is available for free, right? Sorry, kids, once again something that the older generations took for granted isn’t in your future (maybe that’s why young people’s votes should count more). The Wall Street Journal reports that public schools are starting to charge students hefty fees for basic programs to make up for budget shortfalls. The story highlights Karen Dombi, a mother who has three children in an Ohio public school, who ended up paying $4,446.50 to register her kids for basic classes like Spanish 1 and Earth Sciences, as well as electives like band and cross-country. Apparently, this is happening across the country:
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Though public schools have long charged for extras such as driver’s education and field trips, many are now asking parents to pay for supplies needed to take core classes—from biology-lab safety goggles to algebra workbooks to the printer ink used to run off grammar exercises in language arts. In some schools, each class comes with a price tag, to be paid at registration. Others accept credit cards—for a processing fee.
Administrators like to paint it as a necessary sacrifice in the face of huge state budget cuts–either pay for art history or watch it disappear. Collectively, states have cut education funding by $17 billion over the last two years. And while nationally the military and Medicare continue to grow, apparently our kids are the expendable ones.
“Things are getting tighter,” said Collene Van Noord, superintendent of the Palmyra Area School District in southeast Pennsylvania, which recently began charging $20 lab fees for many science, art and music courses. “If we can pass on the added costs for some of our more expensive courses to direct users, it seems more fair than to pass them on to the entire community” in the form of tax hikes, she said.
It takes a village … to ignore the younger villagers to avoid a tax hike. While poor families can get an exemption from fees, wealthier families, which apparently a family of four making $29,000 qualifies as, can get sanctioned for not paying, including having their diplomas withheld and being banned from commencement. Even if a school doesn’t charge for basic programs like Spanish, a $350 fee to join the chess club can discourage kids from building up their resume for college, ensuring that only well-to-do children have an edge when it comes to applying to schools. The story points out that all of this isn’t exactly new, if you go back far enough:
The jump in public-school fees has a back-to-the-future feel for New York University professor Jonathan Zimmerman, who studies the history of education. He’s reminded, he said, of the early 19th century, when public schools drew on taxpayer support, but also often charged tuition. That practice began to shift in the 1840s with Horace Mann’s drive for free “common schools.”
Welcome to the new America, kids! With barely existent labor unions, corporate influence run amok and an anemic public education system, the current generation has led you to a brave new age … the 1800s.
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Photo: Extra Ketchup, Flickr, CC
