There are many good things about the area school systems, but the whole Washington education program leaves a lot to be desired. This year the party in control again cut tens of millions of dollars from the K-12 education budget as well as from state university programs.

Meanwhile, in spite of studies that have shown the 45 year Head Start program has been a $166 billion failure, they established a whole new bureaucracy called the Department of Early Learning. This will be placed in charge of educating children from birth to 3 years old and pre-kindergarten education. Clearly they wanted to jump on some grant funding that was available, but have not thought about how they are going to fund this department after the grants run out.

The same legislators and teachers unions who fund their campaigns literally turned away a major grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, and could not bring themselves to fully comply with the requirements for the Obama administration “Race To The Top” program, finishing 32nd out of 35 applicants, and failing to make the cut for that funding.

This year I am going to vote for the challengers who offer a promise for seeing our students finally get quality educations for the future. No more “re-elect me, I REALLY am good for education”. I am voting for Joe Fain, Mark Hargrove and Rodrigo Yanez. We have given the other folks five decades to fix the problem and they weren’t up to the challenge.

Ron Snyder

Covington