Virginia Republicans Continue Efforts To Defund Local School Divisions By Disguising Charter Schools As Lab Schools

From DPVA:

Virginia Republicans Continue Efforts To Defund Local School Divisions By Disguising Charter Schools As Lab Schools

Richmond, VA — Today, Virginia Republicans continued their assault on funding for local schools by advancing legislation to siphon hundreds of millions of dollars in funding away from our local school divisions.

Throughout his campaign and since he took office, Governor Youngkin has promised to be the education governor, but he’s repeatedly shown just the opposite. His first actions as governor were waging a war against our public schools: threatening to defund local school divisions who disagree with his far-right positions, proposing legislation to gut funding from local schools, and even cyber bullying a public high school student online. 

Democrats today in committee highlighted that Governor Youngkin’s legislation on lab schools is nothing but a charter school bill in disguise – eliminating essential teacher training requirements at a time when we are facing teacher shortages across the Commonwealth and funneling hundreds of millions of dollars away from local schools. His legislation would also enable for-profit organizations to use back-door processes to gain complete control of the lab schools, preventing necessary oversight from local school boards on programs funded with taxpayer dollars.

Glenn Youngkin and Virginia Republicans have shown repeatedly that they are not on the side of our students. 

“The General Assembly must fully fund our schools and focus all of our efforts on helping Virginia students recover from the disruption of COVID-19,” said Delegate Schuyler VanValkenburg. “This bill House Republicans have introduced does not move the ball forward on attaining educational excellence for all of our students. I am deeply concerned that this bill will remove critical oversight of our children’s schools from local school boards and funnel taxpayer dollars away from public education. When we are not currently fully funding our public schools, the Governor and House GOP should be increasing funding for our public schools, not privatizing them.”