A Win for the Deplorables

The vote in the Tennessee General Assembly yesterday was a win for children currently sitting in a terrible school situation who can’t get out. It was a win for parents tired of sending their children to a school system where leadership is behaving unjustly. It was a win for the child who has been bullied and needs a new start. It was a win for those tired of massive over assessment. It was a win for students in poverty who just want a better education, but simply don’t have that choice because of the neighborhood that they live in. Maybe it is because I taught in public schools for over twenty years, but I can see their faces – tangled hair, fingernails dirty from playing outside, broken down shoes, and eyes sparkling with dreams. This was a win for them. The monopoly has been broken.

I knew the “no votes” were in trouble when JD Vance made a timely visit to our area for disaster relief, especially when I saw who met him on the tarmac. IYKYK. The next day Donald Trump weighed in with one, well-timed tweet supporting school choice in Tennessee. Truly, I knew this voucher vote was over last November when Donald Trump won the Presidency. The writing was on the wall. This country had reached an inflection point. It was time to decentralize the power of government and return power to the people.

Tennessee Republicans showed up this time ready to pass school vouchers. They were defeated last winter as legislation stalled in committee. This year parliamentary procedures were changed so that the voucher bill could race through committees, be quickly debated upon the Senate and House floors, and then a vote taken before the ink had even dried. It was a ruthless process, and it is exactly what the Democrat Party has been doing for many years. Republicans are governing like they have won an election – finally.

Let me get super serious for a minute. With my own eyes, over and over I have watched school leadership literally destroy good employees just for disagreeing with the establishment held views. I have witnessed students ostracized by some staff members. The public school establishment had become a monopoly which had no competition and no accountability. They didn’t have to listen. Well, yesterday was for you. Vouchers provide accountability.

And if the they want to survive in this new world of school vouchers and competition, KCS leadership better take a minute, let the dust settle, and read the room. Sometimes we can only get better if we are brutally honest with ourselves. We have private schools moving into Kingsport at the middle and high school levels. If you want to know how to stay relevant during the 21st century, I humbly ask you to read the last ten pages of blog entries on this site. This current BOE needs to remember that they were tasked with leading a movement which would replace many of the central office bureaucrats with leaders who were passionate about creating great school environments and are connected to the the people of the Model City. They were tasked with representing conservative values. Get back to that, and they will thrive. Forget to do that, and our school system will become a dinosaur.

Pat Summitt used to say that we learn more from losses than we do from victories. I absolutely hate losing. I may hate losing more than I like winning. But losses force us to take a close look at ourselves. If we don’t course correct, we will fail to achieve at the level that we are able. During Covid, we were working desperately to get schools open – every waking hour of every day. We kept losing at the BOE level with 3-2 losses….month after month. Schools remained closed. We needed to do something differently. We drew from our experience in fighting multi-million dollar lawsuits and negotiating numerous employment contracts. We built a coalition, got smarter, and began to play ball differently. What the BOE didn’t realize at the time is that we were learning from our losses. And eventually, we would outfox them with the Lord’s help. Don’t think so? Just ask that KCS BOE about Governor Bill Lee ordering schools to open just minutes before they were set to keep us closed on another 3-2 vote. Still makes me smile really, really big….I mean really BIG!

I saw a lot of “vote no to school choice” profile frames pop up on social media yesterday. You know who I didn’t see post that same profile frame? The parents of children in failing school districts.

We are the Basket of Deplorables. We are the Right to Life movement. We are the Silent Majority. We are the new Civil Rights movement. And we have come to take our country back.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. 10th Amendment, United States Constitution