Dear friends,

I believe it is one of the primary responsibilities of our state government to educate its citizens. This is not only good policy, it is smart policy. No one is going to build a plant or open a business where there is no educated workforce.

Our education system is the key to the future of Fayette County and our state. In the past three years, over $1.2 billion dollars have been cut from our state education budgets, requiring over 100 counties to increase their property taxes to compensate for this shortfall.

In this newspaper last week, The Citizen’s John Thompson quoted our Fayette County Comptroller Lee Davis: “The state used to fund 60 percent of the budget but that portion continues to decrease.”

The article also stated: “Superintendent of Education John DeCotis complimented the staff’s work on the budget ... but hopes more help will eventually be coming from the state. ‘They‘re pushing a lot of funding for mandated programs on the local system,’ DeCotis said.”

So what have we received from our current crop of legislators to support our Fayette County school system? One item was the so-called “65 percent Solution” bill passed this election year which dictated that 65 percent of education funds be used for direct classroom expenditures.

Since our county already spends more than 65 percent in our classrooms, what this bill does, in effect, is to remove control from our local administrators and educators.

Fayette County has different requirements from the other 179 school districts in our state. We don’t need the legislature in Atlanta telling us how to run our school system. The Georgia PTA Legislative Council calls this bill “an unwarranted interference of local control” and that “this initiative does not increase funding for education at all; it only re-slices the funding pie.”

If our educators and their professional associations thought this was a bad bill, then why was it passed? I believe this bill had nothing to do with improving education – just more politics as usual.

The legislature gave our teachers a 4 percent election year raise while our teachers’ health insurance costs increased by over 25 percent. My wife is a Fayette County teacher. I’m aware of the needs and concerns of our educational community. Our educators need meaningful raises and smaller classrooms – not election year rhetoric.

I will work with the legislature to restore the education funding cuts and return control to our local school officials.

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