Florida Parents Really, Really Need Trips To Disney World For, Uh, Their Kids' Education
Florida Parents Really, Really Need Trips To Disney World For, Uh, Their Kids' Education
Also, Daddy needs a new Xbox.
This is a story about a bunch of welfare queens in Florida using your tax dollars to buy themselves giant TVs and passes to Disney World.
And by welfare queens, we mean recipients of school voucher funds made available by Ron DeSantis and his administration for educational supplies. And why not, they’ve probably got some unused money in the education budget that public schools would have otherwise used to teach the woke theory that slavery was in fact bad.
The program, called the Personalized Education Program (PEP), provides up to $8,000 every year to homeschooled kids to purchase supplies related to education. And we’re fine with some of this. Your kid needs a new iPad or a notebook computer to write papers or do some research on the Internet? Great. Our elementary school computer existence mostly consisted of playing Pillbox on a TRS-80, we’re truly living in a golden age.
But Popular Info got its hands on some messages from private Facebook groups that indicate parents are putting some of these funds towards items with what the site delicately describes as “an attenuated connection to education.”
For example, one discussion involves how to characterize annual passes to Disney World and Universal Orlando as an education expense. Because nothing says education like a day spent at a theme park dedicated to one thing: sucking money out of your wallet at an exponential rate. Might as well be taxpayer money instead, it’s not as awful as poor people spending EBT funds on food that conservatives don’t approve of:
Theme park tickets were previously a prohibited expense, but Step Up for Students' "reconsidered after hearing from parents about the potential benefits."
We bet. Nothing more educational than a day at the Typhoon Lagoon.
Step Up for Students, a private nonprofit that administers PEP for the state of Florida, also allows parents to use the funds to purchase TVs of up to 55 inches, in case anyone’s child has an urgent, educational need to watch the Orlando Predators in hi-def.
There was also one parent who wanted to use $500 in voucher money to buy a Play Station 5 with the “God of War” bundle and justify it by saying their daughter really loves to play “Minecraft.” Hey, at least they’re not buying frozen crab legs at Publix.
Step Up for Kids also administers what it calls a “scholarship program” and what the rest of us know as “school vouchers.” Combined with PEP, the state of Florida is spending around $3.3 billion while its public schools are critically underfunded to the point where teachers hold GoFundMe campaigns to raise money for basic supplies.
Speaking of teachers, those in Florida are extremely underpaid even by American teacher standards, as the state ranks 48th in the nation in teacher salaries.
New Lessons For Florida School Kids: Native Americans Were No Saints, Slavery Much Nicer Than Death
All of this is going on while the DeSantis administration is busy undercutting academic freedom at public schools, with the “Don’t Say Gay” law and the rejection of AP African American history and AP Psychology classes, apparently on the basis that the College Board, which administers AP programs, refuses to teach about slavery’s bright side or that people sometimes struggle with sexual and gender issues. Somehow we don’t think that replacing these classes with PragerU videos is going to improve the quality of education.
Oh, and the book bannings. We can’t forget the book bannings.
Being radical Marxist communist haters of the American way of life, we’re theoretically not opposed to helping families buy educational supplies, or food and shelter for that matter. But we don’t trust that this money is going to people who really need it.
Florida’s education vouchers used to be open only to low-income families. But legislation signed by DeSantis in March eliminated income caps. Are you a well-to-do family that was already paying to send your kid to an expensive private school? Are you someone with the financial luxury to eschew a full-time job in order to home-school your children? Florida would like to help you. If you’re a poor family forced by economic necessity to send your child to the local underfunded public school, you’re shit out of luck. Try to be born into better economic circumstances in your next life.
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Watch Disney capitalize. “Disney announces the ‘Annual Student Fun in Learning Pass’ which will encourage kids to learn about diversity on “It’s a Small World,” gravity on Tower of Terror, and spirituality in The Haunted Mansion.” “So bring your PEP funds uncle Ron sent you, and do your homeschooling away from home!”
Homeschooling CAN be amazing, especially for neurodivergent kids...but I doubt that's how it's going down in Florida.
Fun homeschooling story from rural Western Australia. Through the 1930s my Gran homeschooled her kids, because they lived too far away from any school. Then in 1941 they moved, and the kids could go to school. My aunt was 12 and had never been inside a school room in her life.
She flatly refused to go back for a second day. Testing showed she was well above the standard to graduate, even though she was two years short of the required age. The government had bigger fish to fry in 1941, so she was quietly passed out two years early and no more was said. Her (less forceful and more social) younger brothers went to school quite happily.