Aranson will strengthen schools

It wasn’t until I read Sunday’s Portland Press Herald story about virtual charter schools that I understood how badly we need to remove Representative Amy Volk from office this year.

Volk serves on the board of directors of the Maine Connections Academy, an online charter school currently bidding for a place in the state education system. With such a blatant conflict of interest, it should be no surprise that she has pushed policies that would siphon money out of our public schools and into the online school she wishes to start.

The real surprise is that anyone else would want these schools here in Maine. The more we learn about them the more we see that they are not providing students with an adequate education. In fact, a 2011 Stanford study shows that students at virtual schools in Pennsylvania rank 13 percent worse in reading and 24 percent worse in Math compared to students at traditional schools.

In essence, Amy Volk wants to take taxpayer money away from a system that largely works, and put it into a system that largely fails, all to the detriment of Maine’s students.

Maine deserves better. There is no doubt that there are ways to improve our public education system but funneling money out of that system and into a new one that is already proving to be inadequate is not the answer.

We deserve more from our elected leaders, which is why this November voters should reconsider their support for Rep. Volk. I’ll be voting for Paul Aranson. Paul wants to strength our schools, not weaken them.