Do you support charter schools and school vouchers?

Jim Grabusky: Charter schools and school vouchers will definitely take away funding from public schools. We need to address the laws that support that need. I would not support anything that would take away the funding from our schools.

Jeffrey Dimmig: Yes, I support vouchers and I would support charter schools. I don’t see myself as a cheerleader for Southern Lehigh school district. I’m here to support the community. I think competition is a good thing. I’m in favor of giving an opportunity to our families to choose as they see fit. Hopefully we are producing a product that people want to come to. I would send my children here.

William Lycett: I’m fine with both. I think the competition and the idea of competition would raise the results being produced by any of the schools. I’ve been part of communities where charter schools existed. They did exceptionally well. The parents that placed their kids there were happy with the results, and the school district hasn’t suffered because of them. Being from a state where the real estate tax was a very small portion of how schools were funded, the real estate tax in Ohio where I used to live prior to moving back to PA is dramatically different than what it is in PA. But they still have schools with good results and charter schools in sub-communities. And bottom line, there wasn’t that much of a disparity in the education or in the way in which it was funded.

John Quigley: I’m in favor of both charter schools and vouchers. I have to assume everyone here is here because they have children in school. If the opportunity exists for them to have a better opportunity they should have that opportunity. Charter schools have produced some excellent results. We have to allow them. We have no choice. When they set that tax rate you pay it, we should at least have the choice on how to allocate those funds.

Corrine A. Gunkle: I support primarily the idea of certain schools. However, I think the way that it is handled from a funding perspective needs to be seriously looked at.  Our district currently spends one million dollars a year on charter schools. We have zero control over how that money is spent. We are looking at reducing teachers. We are looking at reducing administrators. We are freezing budgets for athletics. We are freezing budgets for school supplies. We have zero control over charter school money. We have no say in it. One of the things we are doing is trying to bring our cyber students back in-house. Basically we think that by bringing those students back in we can save $4000 per student. So, there’s significant issues with that. The other thing is that we are constantly held to PSSA standards. We recently saw a report of the nine schools that our students attend. One passed our PSSA. One. That’s your tax dollars.

Editor’s Note: Answers have been edited for clarity and grammar. Content has remained unchanged.