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Imagine for a moment that state leaders decided to implement a change in how North Carolina provides core public services.
Instead of everyone in a community relying on the same police and fire departments, people would instead choose private vendors and receive a check from the government to partially underwrite the cost.
And the vendors would be free to serve whoever they wanted as clients at any quality level. Fire departments that didn’t want to serve Jews or gay people, or that closed on weekends would be free to do so.
People who couldn’t find a provider they could afford or that served their religion would have to rely on a basic and threadbare public program.
The bottom line: If this all sounds like a crazy and unjust way to deliver core community services that all people need, congratulations — you now understand the problem with North Carolina’s deeply flawed school voucher system – a program that sends public tax dollars to unaccountable schools – many of which teach religion masquerading as science and that openly discriminate. Now if only state lawmakers could understand.
For NC Newsline, I’m Rob Schofield.