Public school. It is something that all of us at Rio have in common.

A public school by definition is a school supported by public funds. But in reality, public schools are so much more than that. They are a place for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom to be/do what you want within reason.

As I’m sure we are all aware of, our new president is in the midst of concluding his act of placing government officials into cabinet positions. Many people that President Trump is implementing into these government positions are people with little to no government background.

It is not the fact that they are business men and women who weren’t involved in anything Washington D.C. related, it is the fact that these people are being placed in positions they are less than inept to hold.

I guess this makes sense since Donald Trump himself has no political or governmental history and he’s running the country.

While most if not all individuals being placed into the positions are sub-par, there is one special position that really doesn’t make sense to me.

Betsy Devos the country’s new education secretary. Devos actually does have some previous background in politics, she has been elected chairman of the Michigan Republican Party four times, and she has served in numerous leadership roles with campaigns, party organizations, and political action committees.

The one thing that Devos is not as read up on is public education. Devos has spent her entire educational life in private institutions. She has no idea what public schools are made up of and how vital they are to Americans.

I have no problem with private schools, in fact, that’s where I plan to continue my education after Rio. The problem is that Betsy Devos plans to put federal government funding into charter schools and institutions of the like.

On her website, it claims “Betsy is a pioneer in fighting to remove barriers, enact change and create environments where people have the opportunity to thrive.” How nice that is, except for that is more than likely not what will happen with educational funding moving towards private schools.With Devos planning to funnel more money to these charter schools, it leaves less room for the expansion of public schools.

As the New York Times put it, “ she has pushed to give families taxpayer money in the form of vouchers to attend private and parochial schools.” In all honesty I have no idea what that means; however, I am aware that with this new system, people will not have the same access to good public schools as they do now.

Since there will be more people going to the charter schools with the new vouchers given to them, there will be less students enrolled in the public schools. This means that the schools will have less funding since school systems are paid by students in classes.

Not only will school systems see the effects of less students, but the lower socioeconomic students will be stuck in poor systems with poor curriculum. That leads to a segregation of education which relays to colleges and the kinds of futures these poorer students will have.

On top of all of that, the government will be funding private education. When there is private education, there is no one monitoring what goes on in classrooms. It’s possible that the charter schools being partially paid for by our taxes are going to education that isn’t fact based or targets certain beliefs.

I guess the one thing we can all agree on is that Common Core is evil.