Atlanta's suit for better schools

[Staff]

Fed-up father joins suit for better schools By PAUL DONSKY (http://us.f540.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=pdonsky@ajc.com)

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 01/28/05

The way Dana Williams sees it, he shouldn't have to compromise on his 7-year-old daughter's education.

But the northwest Atlanta resident says the public schools in his neighborhood simply aren't good enough. And he doesn't have the money to buy a home in a good school district or pay for private school.

Fed up with his options, Williams joined two other Atlanta parents in filing a lawsuit Thursday in Fulton County Superior Court, asking that the state's education system be declared unconstitutional.

The parents seek fundamental changes that would greatly increase their educational choices. The suit suggests several ways to accomplish this, including new attendance rules allowing parents to send their children to any public school, no matter where they live. It also proposes that parents be allowed to use tax money to help pay private school tuition, though the hot-button word "vouchers" is never mentioned. The parents also suggest the virtual elimination of regulations that have limited the number of charter schools.

Read the rest of the article here... (http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/atlanta/0105/28edsuit.html)

[Staff]

Georgia Alliance for Choices in Education
For Immediate Release Contact: Glenn Delk
January 27, 2005 (404) 876-3335

Parents and Taxpayers Sue to Enforce Parental Choice in Education As Fundamental Civil Right

January 27, 2005

The Georgia Alliance for Choices in Education, a grassroots statewide organization, has filed a lawsuit on behalf of Georgia parents and taxpayers to restore parental control over education and to protect taxpayers by abolishing skyrocketing property taxes as a source of K-12 funding. The complaint, filed in Fulton Superior Court, Williams, et al. v. State of Georgia, et al., seeks a court order requiring the Georgia General Assembly to fulfill the State’s obligation under the Georgia Constitution to give all parents equal educational opportunities. Dana Williams and the other plaintiffs are asserting their fundamental right as parents to control their child’s education, and also claim that property tax funding of K-12 education is arbitrary, capricious and unconstitutional, and should be replaced with either a sales or income tax.

The suit is filed as a related case to one filed by 50 smaller school districts in September, 2004 by the Consortium for Adequate School Funding in Georgia (“CASFG”) seeking a $2 billion tax increase. In the prior lawsuit, CASFG districts admit they and the State of Georgia have violated parents’ constitutional rights to equal education opportunities. However, the school districts claim the remedy is to impose more taxes to give them more money to continue to fail.

Glenn Delk, the attorney for the parents, said:

“The U.S. and Georgia Bill of Rights implicitly affirms a right to education as part of the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, and explicitly state that no one is to be denied the equal protection of the law. Our current system of organizing and funding public education deprives many parents of equal educational opportunities. President Bush recently extolled the American ideal of freedom in his inauguration speech. This lawsuit seeks to fulfill the promise and dream of the Bill of Rights, President Bush and Brown v. Board of Education by giving equal educational opportunities to all parents by enforcing the fundamental civil right of educational choice for families. According to a recent poll in South Carolina, 80% of its citizens believe parents, not the government, should make the decision about where their children are educated. My clients agree. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized 75 years ago that parents do have a fundamental right to control their child’s education. We are simply trying to enforce the right. Mr. Williams and the other parents believe that expanding educational freedom to include all parents will lead to social justice, greater parental involvement in education and improved public education.

This lawsuit is also about protecting Georgia’s taxpayers from the blatant attempt by school boards to impose a huge court-ordered tax increase through judicial activism. Georgia’s taxpayers need to understand that spending on K-12 education has increased at twice the national average and yet CASFG wants more money from the taxpayers. We hope to persuade the Court that the proper remedy for the State’s failure to provide equal educational opportunities is parental choice, thereby giving Georgia’s property owners a 50% tax cut by abolishing property tax funding for schools, instead of the $2 billion tax increase the school districts seek.”

As Kurt Landgraf, president and CEO of Educational Testing Service, the organization which administers the SAT and AP tests, puts it “… if our goal is fairness as well as adequacy in how we fund our public schools, then we need to get to the core of the funding issue. And that means doing away, once and for all, with the system’s over-reliance on property taxes.”

As Governor Perdue begins his statewide series of community meetings on school finance, parents and taxpayers should ask him and their representative or state senator two questions:

1. Who do you believe should make decisions about a child’s education – parents or the government?

2. Do you support a $2 billion tax increase or a 50% cut in property taxes by abolishing property tax funding of schools?

Georgians of all persuasions – parents, homeowners, businessmen, religious leaders – are entitled to straight answers to those two questions.

[Staff]

February 09, 2005

Published: February 9, 2005 – Education Week
Georgia Lawsuit Seeks Vouchers as Remedy to School Aid Disparities
By Caroline Hendrie

Adding a novel twist to the array of school finance lawsuits against states, a group of Georgia parents is asking a judge to declare both that the state’s education funding system is unconstitutional and that the remedy is not more money to public schools, but greater parental choice.

In the first of what school voucher advocates hope will be a string of similar suits, the Atlanta plaintiffs say they and other low-income parents are being denied their rights to equal access to high-quality schools by an array of government policies.

Read the rest of the article here... (http://www.nceducationalliance.org/research/display_story.html?id=2187)