Groups: School cuts not all equal

State budgets are about deciding what’s important, and public teacher groups say private colleges are given priority. That’s particularly true, they say, in a Republican-led General Assembly that has pushed to provide help to parents who want to send their children to private schools.

Jeff Hubbard, president of the Georgia Association of Educators, said, “It really goes to where their priorities are. If they wanted to support engineering degrees, why not provide the scholarship at Georgia Tech?”

Legislators say it’s cost-effective to provide grants to private school students. They say students who attend those schools save the state most of the cost of educating them.

But the decision to kill the teacher scholarships — and the Legislature’s strong support for private colleges — also had a lot to do with advocacy.

Private colleges put on a full-court press lobbying to keep the nearly $90 million in state scholarships and grants their students will receive next year. Public education groups acknowledge the teacher scholarships were barely on their radar since they spent the session fighting against more than $700 million in other cuts proposed for public schools and universities.

Sen. Seth Harp (R-Midland), who chaired the Higher Education budget subcommittee, said he didn’t hear anyone fight to keep the teacher scholarship programs.

“If you don’t beg, you don’t get to the table.”

Private college lobbyists, on the other hand, brought scores of school presidents and students to the Capitol to argue that supporting private colleges saved the state money.

If all private college students switched to public schools, they argued, it would cost the state more to educate them than it does now to provide scholarships and grants for them to attend private colleges.

Private colleges lobbied lawmakers outside the Capitol too. For instance, Hugh Dorsey Sosebee, who lobbies for Mercer, reported spending about $6,000 on meals and plane tickets for lawmakers during the 2010 session.

Mercer President William D. Underwood was among the private school officials involved in the effort.

“I think these are really good programs, and they are programs that make a lot of sense from a policy standpoint,” Underwood said. “The members of the General Assembly recognize the financial benefit to taxpayers of having a significant portion of our young people educated at private institutions. They also recognize the benefit of having a diverse array of options for young people.”

In the end, the Mercer engineering scholarship, which awarded forgivable loans to 166 students last year, was saved. And, instead of ending tuition-equalization grants, as Perdue recommended, lawmakers budgeted enough to increase the amount given to every private college student from $600 this year to $750 next school year.

They also provided $59.3 million for private college students who earn the lottery-funded HOPE scholarship, increasing their award from $3,500 a year to $4,000 a year.

The $11 million spent this year on the Promise teacher scholarship and HOPE teacher scholarship? Gone.

The Promise teacher scholarship provides loans of up to $3,000 per academic year for top college juniors and seniors going into teaching. The loans are canceled for teaching in Georgia public schools after they graduate.

HOPE teacher provides up to $10,000 in service-cancelable loans to teachers for getting advanced degrees in areas of critical shortage areas, such as math and science. Again, the loans are paid off if the recipient continues to work in Georgia public schools.

Ashley Langford, a Promise recipient this year, said she never knew the programs were in danger.

Langford spent the year interning as a teacher at Brooks Elementary School in Newnan. She said she couldn’t have afforded to take part in the internship program without the scholarship money, which helped her pay for a place to live.

Sheryl Croy, a seventh-grade language arts teacher at Richard Hull Middle School in Duluth, called it “sad” that the state is ending the scholarships.

Croy was a stay-at-home mom who used HOPE teacher to go back to school to get her master’s degree. She said the scholarship wasn’t the deciding factor in her getting the degree, but it helped her avoid having to pay back huge student loans. “I was worried about having $20,000 in debt when I graduated,” she said. “It definitely relieved some of the financial pressure.”

Lauren White, an eighth-grade language arts teacher at Hull Middle School, said much the same thing. She received the Promise scholarship while attending the University of Georgia.

White, who is from Charleston, S.C., said the scholarships helps keep top out-of-state students here after they graduate from local colleges because they are required to teach in a Georgia public school to pay back the loan.

“I’m not from Georgia, but it gave me incentive to stay in Georgia,” she said. “It’s a great incentive to keep top teachers in the state.”

The programs were started at a time when student enrollment was skyrocketing and some districts couldn’t find enough teachers. Now, enrollment growth has slowed and some districts are planning to eliminate teaching jobs.

Tim Connell, executive director of the Student Finance Commission, which oversees the scholarship programs, isn’t sure HOPE and Promise were producing more teachers for the state even when the need was there.

“There are plenty of applicants who want to pursue teaching, so the absence of these programs wouldn’t really effect the number of people who become teachers or get graduate degrees,” Connell said. “We really aren’t increasing the supply of teachers.”