they have met the enemy…
What Florida’s teachers unions consider a menace, and what Florida’s Supreme Court considers an affront to the state’s Constitution, weighs 105 pounds, smiles shyly, speaks softly and wants to be a nurse. Octavia Lopez, 17, an 11th-grader at Miami’s Archbishop Curley-Notre Dame High School in the heart of this polyglot city, was enabled to come to this school because of the smallest of three school-choice programs enacted under Gov. Jeb Bush.
The Opportunity Scholarship Program currently serves just 733 children statewide, 62 of whom are at this school of 416 students. The program provides vouchers, redeemable at private as well as public schools, to students at schools the state says are failing. Archbishop Curley, which in 1960 – just its seventh year – became the first Florida secondary school to be racially integrated, has grades nine through 12 and sends more than 98 percent of its graduates to college.
But Florida’s Supreme Court fulfilled the desires of the teachers unions, and disrupted the lives of the 733 children and their parents, by declaring, in a 5-2 ruling, that the voucher program is incompatible with the state Constitution. Specifically, the court held that the Opportunity Scholarship Program violates the stipulation, which voters put into the Constitution in 1998, that the state shall provide a "uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education."
(snip)
All of Archbishop Curley’s 43 Opportunity Scholarship children who are not graduating in June are going to stay in the school. The voucher is worth about $1,800 less than the school’s $6,400 tuition, and about $3,400 less than the $8,000 cost of educating a pupil. But Brother Patrick Sean Moffett, the head of the school, says "we’re going to keep them all, somehow."
It is stirring to see the quiet tenacity of persons whose lives are disrupted by other people’s political struggles. When Octavia and her mother – and David Hill, 14, a ninth-grader, and his parents, and several other parents and relatives of students – recently gathered at the school to discuss the end of the choice program, there was no rancor.
The children and parents at the table were black. None were Republicans. The NAACP, as usual, is in lockstep with the Democratic Party, which is in lockstep with the teachers unions. But the people at that table spoke only words of gratitude for the school – its small classes and respectfulness. All displayed the dignified patience that ordinary people often display when they are buffeted by the opaque storms of politics.
Enjoy.
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