Are you ready for some football? How about better school funding?
As we enter the home stretch on signature collection for the Better Schools, Better Jobs petition drive, volunteers are looking for every possible way to add to the signature count. Parents in school districts across the state have “signature fever.” They are tired of the chronic under-funding of our public schools, and they are ready to send a strong message about support for adequate school funding.
Every single Mississippi school district is grossly underfunded this year – most by millions of dollars for this year alone. Click here to see how much your district has been shortchanged. Our kids deserve better.
Parents are ready to act, and so volunteers in many districts will be collecting petition signatures at their home football games beginning this weekend. Click here to see the list of schools that we know will have petitions available.
Here’s how you can help:
- Organize a signature collection at your own football game if it isn’t already on the list (be sure to get permission from your principal and/or superintendent first). See details about how signatures must be collected in order for them to count.
- Volunteer to help with the signature collection if your school is already on the list.
- Sign the petition! It will only take a minute, and it will mean a lot to our kids and their schools.
- Let us know if your school is having a signature collection event so we can add it to our web page! Send a quick email to jwinckler@msparentscampaign.org with details like date, time, and location.
The goal is to wrap up most of the signature collection in early September to give circuit clerks plenty of time to verify signatures before the early-October certification deadline. So, schedule an event in your community in the next couple of weeks, and let’s push that signature count as high as we can.
Statewide, enthusiasm for this initiative has been overwhelming! Parents are weary of long school supply lists, crowded classrooms, diminished support programs for students, reduced course offerings, and high activity fees – all the result of chronically underfunded schools. City and county leaders support this because they are tired of the steady increase in pressure on local taxes as legislators at the state level have failed to live up to their obligation, passing the buck to the local level.
You can help turn that around – without raising taxes and without taking money from other state agencies – by signing the petition to put the Better Schools, Better Jobs constitutional amendment on the ballot in November of 2015. Read more about how it works here.
When it comes to our children’s future, we are all on the same team – and it’s a contest that we can’t afford to lose. So, let’s dig deep, give it all we’ve got, and push this one across the finish line. Our kids are counting on a big win. Let’s not let them down!
