School Choice Group Tells Indiana Parents to 'Listen Up'
by Jim Brown
July 16, 2004
(AgapePress) - A school choice group is making Indiana parents aware the President Bush's signature education law provides children with a way out of low-performing public schools.Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, schools that have been designated as "in need of improvement" are required to tell parents that they have an opportunity to make a new choice, and to provide transportation to a better-performing school for parents who choose a new school for their kids.
Spokeswoman Joyce Johnson says the Indianapolis-based Greater Educational Opportunities (GEO) Foundation is emphasizing that aspect of NCLB by relaying it through a campaign that includes billboards, commercials, signs on buses, and even ads in discount movie theaters.
"Last year in Indiana, 80,000 children should have been eligible to make a choice of a better-performing school -- and less than 2,000 did, which indicates to us that most parents don't understand or have enough information to make a choice for their kids," Johnson says.
The "You Can Choose" campaign, funded through a grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Innovation and Improvement, is geared toward getting the word out to parents, whom Johnson feels are simply uninformed about the opportunities available to them for school choice. For one thing, she says, parents are not out any money when they choose a better school.
"[T]hey don't know that this doesn't cost them anything -- [they don't know] that if their child is in one of the schools that needs to give parents choices that it's up to the school to provide transportation," she explains. "So parents just don't know this or I'm sure more of them would be taking advantage of this opportunity because I think everyone wants their child to get a good education."
So why hasn't the word gotten out? Johnson places some of the blame on the schools themselves, which she says do not have an interest in promoting the school choice option because it means more work and a loss of funding when a student transfers to a better school. According to the GEO Foundation, there were 97 schools "in need of improvement" in the state of Indiana.
