Another issue that you won't see in the mainstream press or even the black, liberal, Obamabot press, because it's really about keeping blacks poor, dependent, indoctrinated and voting for Democrats::
Coretta Pittman goes well beyond the 40 hours of service required of parents whose children attend the Good Shepherd School in New Orleans. Last year she did 100.
She borrows her mother’s car to take her son Elias, a second grader, to Good Shepherd each morning rather than sending him to a public school across the street. She chooses to work part-time so she can volunteer.
Without a voucher, Pittman would not be able to send Elias to the private Catholic school.
“I love the school,” she said. “I wouldn’t switch him for anything.”
Pittman fears that without the program Elias’s future could be snuffed out, like her nephew. She gets emotional when talking about his death. “Me and my mother raised my nephew from the time he came home from the hospital,” Pittman said. “A year ago, he was killed. He was really smart. I think he could’ve done and been anything that he wanted to.”
“I just wonder if he would’ve had somewhere like Good Shepherd to go, what could have become of him,” she said. “And I’m just hoping that, I don’t want to ever have to wonder what could have become of my son.”
When we find Elias he is sprinting across the playground. Baton in hand, he nearly barrels his cheering classmates over as he finishes his leg of a relay race. We summon him over. Wearing a huge smile, he tells us what he wants to be when he grows up.
“I like math and numbers,” he says. “I want to be a mathematician and a doctor. I’d love to be a police. My auntie’s husband is a police.”
Elias’s favorite part about school: “I get to talk to my friends.”
“I don’t want to imagine what would happen if the program ended,” his mother says. “It gives my son choices and it gives me hope.”
***
The children at St. Leo the Great Catholic Central in New Orleans know more Spanish than I do. Kids from Ms. Margaret Mary’s third grade class stand to recite “Padre Nuestro”—the Lord’s Prayer—when we walk in. Smiling faces greet us with a resounding “good morning” in each classroom.
A portrait of Barack Obama hangs on the wall. The kids don’t know anything about the motions filed by the president’s Justice Department, which could block kids like them from attending schools like St. Leo—better schools than those in the public system they’ve left behind. They know that they love their teachers, and they are learning.
“What frustrates me—I keep hounding on it, but it’s true,” said Ronald Briggs, chairman of the board at Good Shepherd. “The state of Louisiana saves money on the deal. They actually save $16 million a year.”
“The taxpayer wins, the kids win, and the guardians win. So what’s the problem?”
***
As president, one of the first laws Obama signed killed a voucher program in Washington, D.C. Though Congress worked to reinstate the program, Obama has repeatedly tried to defund it in his budget proposals.
Now the Justice Department is going after Louisiana, first seeking a permanent injunction against the state scholarship program, which would put the fate of future voucher recipients in the hands of federal judges.RELATED: DOJ Changes Strategy in Fight Against Louisiana School Voucher Program
Roughly 6,750 low-income students received a voucher this school year to escape failing schools.
“It’s political. It’s unfortunate. It’s wrong,” said Ann Duplessis, the president of the Louisiana Federation for Children (LFC).
A lifelong Democrat, Duplessis opposed school choice for years until she began to question who the unions were really fighting for.
“It was more of actually looking at those kids,” she said. “I have three girls and three grandchildren. I couldn’t bear the thought of them being in an environment that I didn’t know if they were going to come home that evening.”
“You want to fight for your kids,” she said. “You look in their faces—they’re children.”
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