MY TURN: Idaho public education and your taxes

The Idaho governor's $50 million carve out to fund homeschooling for unregulated and limited accountability homeschool education curriculums to salve a 7% minority is just wrong. Some of the homeschool kids have educated parents who raise the bar for their brilliant children — wonderful. Many more limit the breadth of their learning and release socially awkward adults into the broader world with limited adaptability or skills needed to launch as contributing citizens.

If the parents are uneducated, that legacy continues. The entire "voodoo" of public school indoctrination is another far right red herring that makes headlines while cheating the majority of students. We are $76 million in the hole in Idaho, $50 million thanks to school vouchers catering to a small cohort of parents. These parents made a choice like some parents choosing high cost private schools for their elite children. Self-determination to homeschool or private school educate your offspring should not burden the taxpayers of Idaho and force 3% cuts across multiple sectors of Idaho government. 

Idaho public education is already sitting low on the national rankings and will fall further. The reason East Coast schools rank at the top is because they fund public schools and pay teachers a living wage. Teachers in Idaho are not paid comparably to the education we demand of them to teach our youth. We prefer to "harden" our schools against shooters over keeping up to technology and skills needed in a rapidly evolving world dominated by STEM. North Idaho is a good place to gain practical technical applied work skills like machining and timber works but they still need technology to do so. Homeschooling does not have the benefit of software and advanced tech shared across multiple platforms and cannot possibly stay up to date even with 5K per child per annum windfalls. 

I fear this 5K a student payout serves as a potential for profit-driven birth rates to make large family head counts as a living wage for families. That is SOCIALISM at its core! Sad that our state thinks serving the 7% over the 93% is a noble endeavor. No one can replicate the social cues and adaptation skills garnered amid large and working groups of public or parochial schools where we negotiate challenges needed to get along when the apron strings are cut. Accountability is missing and our governor is just buying right wing votes. 

We have the state we voted for — backward and failing our future citizens across all sectors of society. Teachers have enough to do without "indoctrinating" your child in any absurd numbers. We all had that one oddball teacher and we either ignored them or called them out. That is called LIFE and the SKILLS we need in a non-homogenized world.

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Lynn Fleming is a Coeur d'Alene resident.