I Told You So

Missouri public schools

I talked to a journalist this week who wanted to speak to me about rural schools in Missouri. A friend gave him my number, and we set up a call to talk about the issues impacting the state. Impacting our teachers.

Most importantly, impacting our kids.

We talked about the state of our rural schools, and I’ll just give you a heads up…it’s not good.

The journalist is from SW Missouri, while I am his counterpart in NW Missouri.

If you aren’t from Missouri, you may not know the difference between the northern and the southern parts of the state.

When people ask if Missouri is a southern or midwestern state, I always reply with, “It depends on which part of the state you’re from.”

But, no matter where you’re from in the state, the schools are defunded. The state ranks last or near last in educational funding every year. Starting teachers rank 49th or 50th in pay. We have a voucher scheme, and teacher unions are non-existent in most spaces outside of the cities.

We are in a mess, and it is purposeful. It’s a grift, and it’s a plan to keep folks uneducated. So far…it’s working.

If you’ve been reading me for any length of time, you know that my passion in politics has always been public education. I taught for sixteen years, and the low wages I earned started my radicalization. When you have a BA and an MA, and you still can’t make ends meet, there’s a problem.

But the real radicalization happened when I started contacting my lawmakers about the state of my school. When I started to tell them the stories of schools in our state. They either never replied, or replied in crass and disgusting and unprofessional ways.

I once tweeted that after accounting for inflation, I made more my first year of teaching than I did my 14th year of teaching. A Missouri Republican Representative tweeted back at me saying, “Get a different job. No one owes you anything.”

That lawmaker was Justin Hill. He resigned after he skipped his own Missouri swearing-in ceremony to attend the insurrection in DC on January 6th. I think he is selling life insurance somewhere in Florida now.

Justin got a different job. No one owed Justin anything…

But back to the journalist…we were on a Zoom call, and I could gauge his responses to the topics we covered.

He was animated when talking about rural Missouri and rural schools and Friday night lights.

He wasn’t as light-hearted when we discussed the school funding that has dried up under a GOP supermajority. He asked me when things changed, and I told him I once asked a former English Dept Chair the same thing. My colleague told me that the biggest pay raise he could remember was under the Clinton Administration…

We’ve been slowly starving public schools since.

But the journalist was startled when I started talking about the voucher scheme in Missouri and gave him the names and the connections of the folks pulling the strings behind the curtain. The wealthy donors who have been able to buy their way into the Missouri Statehouse. Buying access to taxpayer funds.

I know this from personal experience…my State Representative and my State Senator have received over $100,000 combined from the Herzog Foundation, an organization you have likely never heard of, but one that is wreaking havoc across the state. The Foundation doles out taxpayer money to private religious schools across Missouri.

The Herzog Foundation also bankrolled my Governor’s campaign with a $1 million donation.

But it doesn’t stop there — the Herzog Foundation hired a State Representative to work full-time for them. His name is Josh Hurlburt, and his first few pieces of legislation were bills to send even more money to private religious schools. It should be a conflict of interest, but no one cares, and Josh continues to write bills to defund public schools.

When I got off the call with the journalist, I came out into the living room and my husband could tell I was tired. I’m not physically tired. I was tired of warning others of what was coming, only to have it crash into my front door.

I want to scream, “Why didn’t people listen to those of us pulling the curtain back?” And then it hit me…I remembered a conversation with a rural Superintendent two years ago.

This Superintendent asked me to speak on rural school funding to a small group of supers from the area. I said yes, but I knew he was going to find out something that I already knew. His fellow Superintendents did not want to hear from me. Not only that, they chastised him for inviting me in the first place.

Because I am “partisan.”

I know this is true because the same supers who didn’t want to hear from me two years ago, are now spreading the word on school defunding…

The same defunding I begged them to talk about years ago. The same defunding that my community gathered to hear about this week. The PowerPoint presented could have been collected from the essays and letters to the editor I have written over the years. Essays begging folks to wake up.

Do you know what the difference in the information presented to my community was? I always point to the lawmakers responsible for the defunding, specifically my State Senator who accepted Herzog money and who was then appointed to the Education Funding Board by the Governor who also accepted Herzog money.

I am “partisan” because I will tell you exactly who stripped the money from rural communities. I can’t be trusted because I ruffle feathers. I am out of bounds because I name names.

Yep. And I’ll keep doing it.

I am not the only one who has been banging this drum, and I am not the only one who has been ignored, but we shouldn’t have to do this. Rural Superintendents and School Boards should have seen the writing on the wall and organized their communities in how best to fight back. Mobilize.

I guess that’s the activist in me, and there’s probably a reason I’m not a School Superintendent.

Some Superintendents have been speaking up, but many more have been silent. Mute. Cowed into remaining voiceless.

We can’t fix the rot that has slowly dismantled public schools in Missouri overnight. I have friends all over the state doing the work, but we are going to need school administrators and Board members to stand up and speak out. They will have to point to those doing the damage. They are going to have to name names.

And they are also going to need to start voting in their students’ best interest. That means not voting for the Republicans who are stained with dirty money from school choice foundations.

I need rural administrators and rural School Board members to realize that removing “politics” from school funding has been an absolute disaster, and staying quiet has been a choice.

Remaining mute while students and teachers and communities are harmed is partisan. It’s bowing to the partisan hacks taking money to defund our schools.

I need school leaders to tell their communities who is hurting them.

If I can do it, they can do it.

~Jess