School choice is important to me because I am that child that it supports. I grew up in an area of the west side of Atlanta where right now, the schools and some of them 97% of the kids can’t read, perform simple math. It’s dismal. It’s bleak. It’s high unemployment, it’s low life expectancy, low graduation rates.
You name it, it is marginalized. And so this community was the same way it was when I was a little girl. My mother sent me to another school on another side of town using someone else’s address. So that was the choice back then. And today, people are still using people’s addresses to go to schools and other communities, but it’s illegal, and people are going to jail because of that.
And so we cannot let a zip code limit us, especially when the people that are running the schools have the capacity to change the curriculum. They have the capacity to change the times of the school. They have the capacity to change the management of the schools. They have the capacity to give the teachers more opportunities to not be so handcuffed to the system. Leadership is not doing that.
That leadership is Democrat. Leadership and education is just too important of a value for us to let it go without being focused on a moment longer. I’ve been a Democrat my entire life.
My entire family are Democrats. I am a Democrat.
I was a Democrat.
