Cheers and Boos: March 15

Cheers to Wayne Hoffman of the Idaho Freedom Foundation: For this week’s editorial explaining why Idaho doesn’t need additional daycare laws. Proponents of the bill have failed to prove by any standard that Idaho’s daycare laws are not working. Licensing requirements are already in place for day cares with as few as thirteen children.

In addition as Hoffman points out, current law allows individual localities to put their own day care laws in place. Boise and Coeur d’Alene have stricter laws that are in place. This is fine. What I wouldn’t find it unreasonable to lower the minimum size of a day care to be subject to licensing from thirteen to something like nine. However, requiring somebody whose watching four kids to get a day care license is too much. Whatever the number placed on day care requirements

For some parents, the transaction involving leaving one’s kids with a stranger is no more painful or complicated than that of buying a microwave oven; the toughest – and sometimes the only – question is, “How much will it cost?” There’s nothing you or I or the Legislature can do to change that reality, yet that’s what it takes to make kids safer in a day-care setting.

The burden has been and always will be on the parents. It’s up to them to do the research – to do the background checks, to conduct surprise inspections and to ask the tough questions.

Indeed.

Cheers to Rep. Branden Durst (D-18) who mentioned in his district newsletter that he introduced a well-thought out bill on education, HB 84 which is explained well in the statement of purpose.

This legislation seeks to permit instate private kindergarten providers the same rights as out of state kindergarten providers. Currently a student who does not reach the age of five prior to September 1st, but attends an out of state kindergarten, is permitted to continue to first grade. If the same student were to attend an instate private kindergarten, the student would be required to repeat kindergarten at the expense of taxpayers. If this legislation is adopted, the student who attends an in-state private kindergarten would be given a first grade entrance exam approved by the State Department of Education. The successful passage of the exam would permit the student to continue on to first grade as those that had attended kindergarten out of state.

Given our state’s desperate fiscal straights, I’m wondering why this bill has not been passed out of committee yet. It seems like a common sense winner for taxpayers.

Big Time Boos to Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID.) I don’t usually have much negative to say about Senator Crapo’s service in the Senate, but his vote this past week in the United States Senate blows my mind.

DC offers an opportunity scholarship program for poor inner city students in the DC School district. A provision inserted into the most recent omnibus bill would end the scholarship after the 2009-2010 school year without further congressional authorization. This is a Democratic attempt to sacrifice DC School Children to the Teacher’s unions and take them out of private schools where they’re doing well.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKzZJoPu1OQ[/youtube]

The maddening fact? Crapo went along with the anti-scholarship efforts. Only four Republicans voted against removing Durbin’s offering to Teacher’s Unions from the bill: Specter, Murkowski, Snowe, and Crapo.

That’s like one of those old, “One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn’t belong…” sketches from Sesame Street. Even Senator Susan Collins (R-Me.) got this right, as did Democrats Robert Byrd (D-Wv.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.)

Even President Obama realizes ripping kids out of schools they’re learning in doesn’t make sense and his Press Secretary said Obama will seek to restore funding.

What was Crapo thinking? How does he end up to the left of Susan Collins, two Democratic Senators, and President Obama?  I’ll be sending his office a polite but pointed e-mail and every Idaho citizen concerned with educational opportunity should do the same.