Carthage ISD Superintendent Jarrod Bitter said the move in the Texas Legislature to encourage the use of vouchers would be detrimental to public school districts.
Making a presentation last Thursday to a combined meeting of the Carthage Lions Club and the Rotary Club of Carthage, he stressed the importance of public education and the way it places an emphasis on control at the local level.
“Vouchers, by themselves, I think we can all agree there is nothing conservative about taking public dollars and then providing them to people with no accountability for how those dollars are spent or the outcomes associated with those dollars,” he said.
“We don’t have to go on and on to understand, further beyond that, to see how that stuff can be detrimental to the public school system,” Bitter said. “There are a lot of strings attached to the dollars we receive related to accountability, related to STARR testing, related to requirements for the federal dollars we receive.