New Solution: Give Parents the Power to Seek Quality Education for their Children

By Rashad Turner, Minnesota Parent Union President and Executive Director

Access to quality education should not just be for the rich. Quality education is a liberty every child should have. But here in Minneapolis and St. Paul, it isn’t.

Minneapolis and St. Paul school districts spend over $18,000 a year per student. What do we get for those dollars? Uneducated students and children with unfulfilled potential! 

Some organizations and lawmakers want to throw billions of dollars at our public schools to try to fix the problem, but why? We’ve done that in the past, and we still have Black, Brown, Indigenous and children from low-income families not being taught and falling further and further behind their peers. 

We need to do something different – something that would put the power in the hands of people who know what’s best for each individual child… their parents! 

Education Grants Program

An education grants program would give parents that freedom. They could choose the best education for their student regardless of socioeconomic status. Similar programs have been implemented in other states over the past year such as Indiana, Idaho and Virginia, giving parents the power to seek a quality education for their children.

Education is a civil right, and our Black, Brown, Indigenous and children from low-income families are being denied that right because of a broken system. Instead of continuing to throw money at schools and hoping it makes a difference, let’s put it to work in new ways.

How Education Grants Would Work

Once approved, education grants in Minneapolis and St. Paul would be available to parents in those districts through an application process. Parents could then access a portion of their taxpayer dollars (about $12,000) and apply it to pre-approved education services such as:

✔️ Tuition at a non-public school or post-secondary institution

✔️ Transportation to a higher quality public school district

✔️ Tutoring

✔️ Curriculum

✔️ Educational therapies

The grant program would be voluntary and has been designed to be tax neutral with no imposed changes to public education. Local and federal dollars would remain at the neighborhood public schools. And to ensure public schools aren’t completely gutted, no more than 10% of students from each district would be eligible for the program.

This issue is not about public schools or private schools; this is about choice and giving parents the power, regardless of their race and/or financial status, to send their kids to a school that will give them the best education possible.

Every child deserves the opportunity to learn, and a grants program is how we make that happen.

As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr once said, "Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom.”

The Movement for Parental Empowerment Continues

To make an education grants program possible, we must first collect 30,000 signatures from parents within Minneapolis and St. Paul school districts who are in support of legislation that gives tax-paying families access to quality education.

If you want more power to seek a quality education for your child, take action and sign your name here: https://bit.ly/3Xsn0tm