Taking A Stand: Put lottery money in K-12 education
I’m a smart man but even I wouldn’t have been able to maintain a 3.0 GPA to keep one of those state scholarships.
As I recall, I finished Tennessee Tech with a 2.6 average back in 1988 when you didn’t have to mortgage your favorite pet and your first born to pay back student loans like you do now. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know a college education is quickly becoming something exclusively for the rich, the super athletes and the super brains.
This is unfortunate since many of the main contributors to our society are the C-students, folks who come from middle to lower class income families and those who don’t quite finish with a 3.0 every semester.
But, suppressing some of our greatest future leaders by pricing them out of higher education is not the goal of my column. Instead, I’m here to criticize the way the lottery money is being spent.
The way I see it, there are three major reasons we are wasting our lottery money on the scholarships. First, folks who do maintain 3.0 averages or better generally have other scholarships to fall back on, since you don’t go from mediocrity to super genius when you check into your dorm room.
Second, a kid from a billionaire family can still get his share of the state pie just as would a kid from the trailer park.
And third, with the increase of tuition, which is partly due to the fact universities see they can grab government cash easily through things like the state scholarship fund, will soon equal out where the state scholarship makes zero impact as $3,000 today won’t be worth $3,000 tomorrow. And, with more kids on the scholarship, the awards will go down, plus they will always be tied to how many people in the state are gambling on the lottery in a given year.
Instead of wasting this money like we are, why not re-direct these millions and put them into K-12 education, where everyone can benefit. Instead of just brains, we can have kids who have special needs, kids who aren’t geniuses, and kids from the other side of the tracks all benefiting through their parents’ gambling. After all, those are the folks who are playing the lottery. Very few rich and successful people ask for Lucky 7’s folks. Think about it.
It’s a shame when a teacher has to spend his or her own money to buy supplies for their school, or when we have to send our kids out to sell candy bars just because public schools are under-funded. Meanwhile, we’re fighting a losing battle with colleges and soon the scholarships will be next to useless. And don’t give me that line about some kids not being able to attend college without it. I came from a poor family and I made it by without scholarships. I just had to pay back some loans at the end.
Hey, I’d much rather have my kid getting what he needs in K-12 than flushing the money down a university toilet because primary education is what makes the person.
I gained a wealth of knowledge in the schools of Warren County, but, to save my life, I can’t think of two things I learned in four years of college. They made me take a year of German and I can’t speak a word of it now. I had to take algebra, and I couldn’t find the square root of squat.
Sure, college is good for the r?sum?, but high school and elementary school are what teaches you what you need. That’s where our money needs to go seeing as only a small percentage of us will ever attain a college degree. Why not spend the money on the larger percentage? It just makes sense.
Duane Sherrill is a reporter for the Standard. He can be reached at 473-2191 or by e-mail at [email protected].