Bernie Sanders

Submitted opinion-editorial

This week, I am visiting South Carolina to learn more about the challenges facing Upstate residents, especially in public education, criminal justice and rural issues. I want to find out about how we can work together to address some of the state’s most serious problems, and reach people in communities that have been left behind.

Across this country, teachers have been on strike because they are badly underpaid. They lack basic supplies, work in rundown classrooms, and their professional expertise is undermined by excessive standardized testing that takes the joy out of learning. Far too many are leaving the profession entirely.

These dynamics have reached crisis levels in South Carolina, where public schools lag behind national averages in reading, writing and job preparedness. Many schools are racially segregated, and magnet and charter schools are drawing resources and high-performing students away. Meanwhile, amid cuts in funding for school programs, one in five children in South Carolina is going without meals.

This year, the situation has become an emergency. The start of school saw a 16 percent increase in unfilled teacher vacancies, and teacher pay was well below the national average. Adding insult to injury, under President Trump’s new budget, South Carolina would lose $28 million of grants to help high-poverty schools boost teacher salaries. Overall, South Carolina’s public education system would lose roughly $246 million under the Trump budget, denying 14,000 students access to after-school programs.

This endemic lack of investment in teachers, public schools, and educational opportunity is particularly acute in rural communities. Kids are starting kindergarten without basic skills: Some do not know how to recite the alphabet or spell their own names.

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Even after school districts along the Corridor of Shame sued the state and endured decades of legal struggle, Republican leadership is still not giving them what they need to provide adequate education for their students – most of whom are poor and African American.

Without a strong education early on, South Carolina’s young people will have trouble finding jobs, lose hope, and some will land in jail when they could have been going to college.

What’s truly shameful is that last year, South Carolina spent $11,552 on average per student, while spending $21,756 on average per prison inmate – nearly twice as much. It makes absolutely no sense that Republican leaders in South Carolina, and other parts of the country, would invest more in keeping people in prison than in keeping them in school.

If I am elected president, I will do everything I can to reverse this absurdity. I will work to rebuild our public school system, especially in communities that need the most attention, and fund jobs and apprenticeship programs to combat the hopelessness of unemployment.

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I will also work to reform our broken criminal justice system. Right now, we are spending $80 billion a year to lock up 2.2 millions people, hundreds of thousands of whom have not been convicted of a crime and are solely in jail because they can't afford their bail. We are criminalizing poverty. And because of the historical legacy of racism in this country, we are disproportionately criminalizing people of color.

Across the country, and in South Carolina in particular, prisons are in disrepair, there are serious staffing shortages, and prisoners are being treated inhumanely. The pathway from prison to society is broken.

We must prevent employers from discriminating against applicants based on criminal history, and denying ex-offenders basic rights to housing, food stamps, education, and voting. We must end the cash bail system, and stop the destructive “war on drugs.” We must eliminate mandatory minimums, reinstate the federal system of parole, and bring about major police department reform.

We must also provide health care as a right. Today, South Carolina is one of a handful of states where Republican governors have refused to expand Medicaid. When we are in the White House, that is going to change.

We are going to create a Medicare for All single-payer program that would cut costs and eliminate waste, while providing health insurance and lower-cost prescription drugs to everyone in this country, including the hundreds of thousands of South Carolinians who are not getting the care they need.

My campaign slogan is “Not Me, Us,” because no one person can make the changes I am proposing. It requires a massive grassroots movement to take on the billionaires, corporate interests and Trump allies who have a financial stake in the status quo.

But together, we can and will take them on – and transform this country. I hope you will join me.

Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, is seeking the Democratic Party nomination to run for president in the 2020 election.