Stand Up For Public Education

Opened on March 02, 2010 | Contact Petition Author

We, the undersigned Faculty and Staff of Roxbury Community College, are uniting our voices today with voices of educators across the United States who call for an immediate end to budget cuts in the area of education and public services.

Community Colleges today are the starting point for persons of all backgrounds who seek to educate themselves and build a bright and productive future. At Roxbury Community College we know from personal experience that we provide crucial opportunities for people who have had many doors closed to them in the past. We attempt to provide an excellent education while we are critically understaffed in all areas, and increasingly rely on the labor of low paid adjuncts.  A high proportion of our students care for other family members while attending school and yet we have not a single fulltime social worker on staff.

The Patrick and Obama administrations have recently talked about maintaining and increasing support for community colleges in particular and public education in general. Yet Massachusetts community colleges will face  level funding at best and a possible 22% budget cut. Only last week we learned that many local branches of our Boston public libraries are in danger of closing due to budget cuts.

What are our priorities as a people? Are we willing to continue misguided and disastrous wars abroad while our own population grows increasingly desperate? What kind of nation cuts back on libraries and public colleges while bailing out an entire class of wealthy bankers?

Today, March 4, unions and student groups across the country are striking and conducting actions on behalf of public education. Today we ask our fellow citizens of Massachusetts to consider three questions:

·       What does public education mean to you?

·       How do you feel about living in a country that spends more on building and using weapons than on educating its people?

·       What is the difference between banning books and simply making them inaccessible to a majority of people?

The spirit of this letter is to build a united movement of students, faculty, and staff that turns up the heat, rather than passively waits for worse to come.  We can't predict exactly where this will take us, but we believe in taking steps that empower us to be agents of change.