PROGRAM — Choice Scholarship Program

In the state of Indiana, students are forced to go the school that their zip code falls into. Whether that school has a good overall school rating does not factor into that decision. Many parents are forced to send their children to a failing public school if they cannot afford a good school.

Many of the public schools in Indiana have a D or F overall school rating. The right to a good education should not be reserved for just the wealthy people in society. Everyone deserves the right to a good education. This problem is majority with minorities because of the lack of opportunities in the communities. The parents of minorities often struggle to make ends meet and cannot afford to also pay for their children’s education. They should not be forced to send their kids to a failing school because of that. That will only continue the cycle of minorities struggling to make it in life.

Minorities disproportionately struggle to graduate from high school and often don’t have the tools to continue their education or they make it to college but are not properly equipped to succeed. They do not know how to properly study, type papers, and adjust to the workload. The state is essentially setting minorities up for failure. When minorities don’t go to college they are often left to work odd jobs that hold no future value. They often are influenced by youth around them that did not go to college but are still making a living for the time being.

The problem with school choice can be fixed by both senators and the people. Senators have a say in what happens in their state. The people that vote for the senator always have a say because they are voting for someone that they believe represents what they believe in. Expressing their frustrations through emails and voting approval is one way of changing school choice policies.

The voucher program affected me and my family directly. When I was in seventh grade, my mother began looking for high schools that my sister and I could attend. She was not satisfied with the test scores and overall school rating of many of the public schools in central Indiana. My mother heard about the voucher program from one of her co-workers and did more research about it on her own. She met all the requirements for the voucher program so she thought she would apply and give it a chance.

That chance she took changed my sister and I’s life for the better. She got accepted to receive a voucher during our seventh grade year. My eighth grade year my mother sent my sister and I to Heritage Christian School. It was a tough adjustment to the academic workload because the school we came from was failing and not teaching the proper things during class.

The high school years were very rough for me because I was a multiple sports athlete. My mother never let me use that as an excuse to get bad grades so I learned I would have to work hard. The teachers would give us two hours of homework each night so it was a good workload. My senior year of high school Heritage Christian was named the number one college preparatory school in central Indiana. This means that my mother was able to take my sister and I out of a failing school system and put us in a succeeding one. The adjustment from high school to college has been a smooth and easy adjustment. College feels easier than high school to me because of how much work they gave us in high school.

I never thought about going to college before I became acquainted with people who wanted to succeed in life. They never thought about not going to college and pushed me to become a better person with positive thoughts.

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