It was early September in 1963 when I first sat at my desk in Mrs. Sides’ first-grade classroom at Stewart Elementary School in Lubbock. My parents bought a house two blocks down on the same street sometime before school started, and I would often walk or ride my bike to school.
Through the education I received there I learned to read and write; I learned some history, I learned how to add and subtract, and I became intimately familiar with the smell of ink from the mimeograph machine on test days.
I remember all those teachers - Mrs. Poteet in second grade, Mrs. Dorman in third grade, Mrs. Snodgrass in fourth grade, Mrs. Bradstreet in fifth, and Mr. Matthews in sixth grade.
Luckily for me and all the students in that school, there was a decision made by people we didn’t even know to build and pay for a school, and to provide teachers and equipment, long before I started attending.
That generosity continued in seventh grade at Wilson Jr. High — I still remember the words to the school song!
After that year, my parents moved to Iowa Park, Texas, and I completed grades 8-12 there — again, the schools were provided by people in the community that didn’t even know the Keck family, or that we were going to move there.
After high school, again through the largesse of the people of Texas, I was able to pay my own way through college without incurring debt due to low tuition rates at Midwestern State University, where I graduated in 1979.
I had a number of occupations after college, but for the last (almost) 30 years I have published a community newspaper. During that course of time I have served on local boards, participated in the community, and have been honored to be elected president of the North and East Texas Press Association, the Texas Press Association, and now I serve as president of the National Newspaper Association Foundation.
To say that is not to toot my own horn — none of this would ever have happened without a free, quality education in public schools. My dad was born in the back room of his father’s Texaco station in Seymour, Texas. My mom was born on the family farm in Spade, Texas.
College, for me or my brother, was never even considered as a possibility by my parents — neither of them had college degrees.
My opportunities all happened because taxpayers in the Lubbock Independent School District and in the Iowa Park Consolidated Independent School District paid for schools, equipment, and teachers so that kids like me, and multiple thousands of others, could get a leg up and have a possibility of a better life by providing us with an education.
It happened because taxpayers in Texas provided enough funding so that I could go to school in the mornings, clean carpets in the afternoons, and study at night in pursuit of a college degree.
I’ll bet many of you have similar stories.
I’m very concerned because the Texas Legislature and Governor Abbott are about to put all of that at risk by passing and signing into law a voucher scheme that is sure to deplete money that could be used to educate younger versions of ourselves.
Those who are proposing this new entitlement program will tell you that kids like me in 1963 would have a “choice” of where to go to school. I can tell you my parents would never have been able to afford to send me to a private schools, even if there had been vouchers.
To a large degree, the only people vouchers will benefit are those who can already afford to send their kids to private school.
In listening to the debate, I often hear voucher proponents refer to “failing public schools” as if that was a thing. Schools are a reflection of the community around them, and I will submit that if there is a failing public school, it is located in a failing community.
I have also heard that the voucher scheme will not affect public education funding, but it already has. Governor Abbott held school funding hostage during the last legislative session because the house refused to pass vouchers, and school districts across the state were left short of funds.
Today there are students in our local community, and in less fortunate communities, who just need the opportunity an education provides to make themselves better. A quality public education can do that.
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