Which Nebraska Kids Deserve Our Support?

Current Nebraska law discriminates against students who are not served well by the public school system. Other states are recognizing that in order to best serve K-12 students, the students need to be funded equally, regardless of their abilities, interests, and challenges.

For instance, in Colorado, Republicans Lang Sias and Owen Hill and Democrats Brittany Pettersen and Angela Williams sponsored a bill that provides equal funding for charter schools. Senator Angela Williams said that the measure “first and foremost provides equitable funding for all Colorado’s children no matter what type of school they attend.”

Did you catch that? The funding is for the children. For the children.

If a state values each of its citizens equally, it only makes sense that each student would be equally supported in his or her education. And yet, in Nebraska, only the students who fit in at certain schools are supported in their educations. Most states are now offering equal funding to children who learn best in public charter schools. In Nebraska, we don’t even have poor funding for children who learn best in public charter schools. Those kids get no funding at all.

I was making phone calls recently to talk to Nebraskans about education opportunity, and one mother shared a heartbreaking story. She has two young adult sons who have both graduated from high school. They’re highly intelligent (the one who was tested has an IQ of 145), but they never quite fit in at their local public schools. They sometimes had trouble focusing, and they were restless with the curriculum.

This mother noticed that her friends who were employed by the education system seemed to know how to get their children what they needed. They knew which strings to pull to get their children into certain programs. She asked lots of questions but never received helpful answers, and she grew increasingly frustrated as the years went by.

Her sons both lost interest in school because their needs weren’t being met. One of them is now working at Home Depot and the other isn’t sure what to do with his life. “The world is deprived of some great minds,” this mother said to me, “because I couldn’t get them the educations they needed.”

More specifically, Nebraska is deprived of those great minds. I asked this mother what would have been helpful to her when her kids were younger. She said she needed more options, and she needed information about how to navigate a system that seemed confusing and not concerned about her children’s specific needs.
​
Nebraska’s traditional public schools work very well for some children. But they don’t work for everyone. And these children should not be consigned to a limited future just because some people think everyone should learn the same way.
​
That’s discrimination.

As it stands today, there are tens of thousands of children in Nebraska who are being educated outside the public school system. For many different reasons, their parents have decided that their children need to be taught in a different manner. There are other parents whose children are currently in the public school system even though it's not a good fit for them--and many of these children are not thriving. The woman I talked to on the phone is not the only mother in Nebraska who borders on tears when she talks about her frustrations regarding her kids’ educations.

This is what happens when systems are more important than people. People get lost and forgotten.
​
At this point, the teachers’ unions and Stand for Schools are actually testifying against tax-credit scholarships, which don’t take a single penny away from Nebraska K-12 funding since they’re funded by private donations (although from the rhetoric you'd think private school administrators were raiding the public school funds). These people feel so threatened by any sort of competition that they are trying to prevent low-income children from receiving scholarships to go to private schools. They’re the people blocking the doors of opportunity for kids in Nebraska. I wish they would listen to the stories I’ve heard from frustrated Nebraska moms and dads.​

​We’re very far behind the rest of the country when it comes to offering equal support to all of the children in our state. Hopefully, we can begin taking meaningful steps to end this discrimination.

We'd do well to remember what Democratic State Senator Angela Williams so wisely said: we need to provide "equitable funding for all [Nebraska's] children no matter what type of school they attend."