“I’ve been voting Republican my whole life. I’m super conservative,” Pine Tree superintendent Steve Clugston tells the camera in an Instagram reel. “I’m gonna tell you what, when Greg Abbott sold us out to the billionaires and sold out our schools, I’m done with his leadership.” In the Texas governor’s race, Clugston is voting for Abbott’s Democratic opponent, Gina Hinojosa. The Pine Tree public school district is in Longview, Texas. The majority of its 4,400 students are economically disadvantaged.
Clugston is appalled by Texas’s voucher program, Texas Education Freedom Accounts, which puts state money in accounts for families to use outside public school: up to nearly $10,500 for private school, up to $30,000 for children with disabilities and up to $2,000 for home-schooled students. Vouchers are costing the state about a billion dollars this year, and could ultimately cost $4.4 billion annually. Texas public schools will lose a projected $227 million just this year.
Hinojosa has made saving public education central to her campaign. If elected, she has vowed to “end the voucher scam.” Vouchers failed in the Texas Legislature multiple times, with rural Republicans siding with Democrats to block them. In rural areas, “school choice” tends to be a mirage, with few private schools and public schools as the heart of small-town life.
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing