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What the St. Petersburg Times didn't mention (John Kirtley)

Yesterday’s St. Petersburg Times article illustrates why we elected not to do a press release to the Florida papers on our radio ad campaign.

As mentioned in the article, my organization is running radio ads in Florida aimed at convincing certain black state senators to vote for a proposed constitutional amendment to protect the Florida school choice program.  Here are just a few things the article failed to mention:

• I mentioned repeatedly that we had over 250 low-income parents contribute to the ads. To me that is the most powerful aspect to all this—parents who are directly affected by this program explaining what it means to them.  Is it any surprise the reporter omitted the number of parents involved in this?
• And just who are the people in the ads, and where are they from?  They’re parents and ministers from the senators’ own districts.  But you wouldn’t know this from reading the article.  We didn’t bring in some hired gun activists from elsewhere to manufacture these ads—these are just people looking to keep their kids in good schools. 
• There was also no mention at all of the threat to pre-K and college scholarships, which the reporter and I discussed at length.  If state-funded scholarships are unconstitutional based on a question of separation of church and state—which is what the Florida Supreme Court ruled earlier this year—then the Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten Program, the Bright Futures Scholarship Program, FRAG, and a number of other state-funded education programs which allow scholarships to be used at faith-based schools are likewise unconstitutional.  (Presently the ACLU is waiting in the wings with a lawsuit against the VPK program depending on what happens with the proposed amendment.)
• The radio ads weren’t our idea.  When we explained to parents in Jacksonville and Orlando what was happening in the Senate, they became so outraged over their senators’ lack of support for school choice, they suggested running the ads to apply some pressure. 

I wish I could say I’m surprised at the final version of the article.  But we’ve grown used to this sort of thing out of Florida media. 

John Kirtley is vice-chairman of the board of the Alliance for School Choice and leads the Florida Education Freedom Foundation.