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Activists rail against Bush's education policy
BY BETH SCHWARTZAPFEL
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Rhonda Bleeker’s daughter, Ashley, goes to Nathanael Greene Middle School in Providence. The 35 kids in Ashley’s history class share five textbooks. Although the school has three lunch periods, Bleeker says, there’s often no food by the time Ashley gets to the cafeteria. There’s a waiting list for after-school tutoring. If Ashley forgets her pencil, her teacher can’t give her one. It’s not that the teacher refuses — there just aren’t any. That’s why Rhonda joined the "Invest in Schools, Invest in Kids" campaign of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). ACORN’s effort hinges on the fiscal 2005 state and federal budgets that members of Congress and state legislators are poised to pass in the coming months. ACORN contends that although the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act promised sweeping educational changes, it has been — and stands to remain — vastly under-funded. Locally, ACORN targeted Governor Donald L. Carcieri’s proposed $7.9 million in cuts to public education. The idea is to pressure the president, the governor, members of Congress, and state legislators to allocate more funding for education while budget negotiations remain active. (As it happened, the governor on Tuesday, May 25 rescinded the education cuts, citing higher-than-expected state revenue.) The campaign has several components. On April 20, parents and teachers aligned with ACORN staged a "graduation or incarceration" rally at Oliver Perry Middle School to raise awareness about the choices facing some young people. On Tuesday, May 25, ACORN mounted a "lemon-aid" demonstration on the State House lawn, featuring an oversized glass of lemonade priced at about $8 million. Next month, ACORN will run a voter-registration drive, targeting prospective voters at grocery stores, homes, and in high schools. Carcieri spokesman Jeff Neal accuses ACORN of taking numbers out of context. He acknowledges that this year’s initial budget allocated $7.9 million less than last year’s for direct aid to public schools, but says that direct aid to charter schools would increase. He also blamed the General Assembly for relying too much on one-time windfalls, such as federal funds and the national tobacco settlement (in a controversial move, the legislature spent 10 years’ worth of payments from the tobacco industry as a lump sum in 2002) to fund education. "The governor believes that state government has been spending beyond its means for several years now," Neal says. "Spending increases of this magnitude are ultimately unsustainable." Aimee Olin of Rhode Island ACORN hopes the demonstrations and door-to-door canvassing will cancel funding cuts while building "up a group of parents to be involved and be more vocal in the schools." If parents are more involved — joining committees, holding their children’s schools accountable — perhaps the situation won’t reach a crisis point at budget time each year. As it stands, though, even before the rescinded cuts were proposed, Ashley Bleeker’s classroom was already overcrowded and her school strikes critics as under-funded. Rhonda Bleeker, who describes herself as "one of those mothers that won’t shut up," doesn’t expect every parent to be able to do the same. "The rents are so high that a lot of these parents are working one or two jobs just to put food on the table . . . Right now, with the classes as crowded as they are, it’s like we’re leaving our children with babysitters. It’s not the schools’ fault. It’s not the teachers’ fault. They can only work within the budget." Describing how Ashley’s computer teacher was laid off, Bleeker says, "Just because these kids are born poor doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have a chance. You gotta know how to use a computer to get a job."
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