Rough Draft: Prop 30

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Shawn Vogler

Instructor Knapp

English 2-76847

07 October 2012

Not Your Future, Our Future

Proposition 30 will be appearing on the upcoming ballot, which will greatly help our schools in California. If voters pass prop 30, around $6 billion will be harvested from taxpayers making over $250,000 per year for seven years. The State sales tax will also increase by .25% for four years. This money will go to help K-12 schools, higher education along with public safety. Today’s students are tomorrow’s future and they need a proper education; so when you are filing out this upcoming ballot, don’t just think about yourself and your money but as a community and the golden state of California.

Voting Yes on prop 30 helps California get back on track to a bright future by providing schools with the needed funding to ensure the best education and safest streets California can offer. A brain learns how to process words through reading, speaking and spelling by age seven. In elementary school it is important to have teachers who can help any students try to achieve mastery. This is very hard when the state education’s budget dwindles daily. Prop 30 will give money for more teachers so classes so students are not crammed into them like sardines. Passing prop 30 will not just help schools, but it will also help keep our streets and neighborhoods safe with more cops patrolling.

If Proposition 30 does not pass there will be even more copious amount of cuts that will take place. As you know state employees like park rangers have a certain amount of furlough days because of the tight budget. If prop 30 is shot down then the schools will be cut short by three weeks because of the lack of money. The $6 billion that will be cut from schools making education harder because there will be devastating to everyone so think of California as your family and vote yes on 30.

 How would you feel if you could not go to work?  You would eventually get fed up with it. This is how students feel. With all of the tuition hikes, students and their families cannot afford tuition- even at community colleges. California’s schooling gets people ready for the working world. The long chain of school and work are all intertwined and crucially follow one another and if one step is done poorly, you can crash.  As a kid, you may have dreamed of becoming a Doctor, Fireman, Police Officer or Veterinarian; but what do all of these professions have in common? Lots of Education. To become a Doctor there is many years of schooling but imagine how hard it would be if teachers had enormous class sizes you only have two class to choose from because all the other ones were cut, that is what will happen if Proposition doesn't pass.

I have come through all of the K-12 classes and am currently a student in community college with tuition rising every semester. My fellow students and I deal with the harsh reality of not getting the right classes that we need because they have been cut and there is no money to hire any more teachers to teach it.  Kids and students get to see al of the administrators, teachers, custodians and other staff members get terminated from insufficient funds. You may not think that something like ‘paper’ would be needed so badly but my 12^th grade calculus teacher would dig through every recycling can to find paper with a blank side that she could print on. She was not going to have us (her students) not receive a good education because my high school did not have enough money to give paper to the teachers. Mrs. Porrier was an amazing teacher and I learned so much in that class because every day we had worksheets on bunches of different colored pieces of paper from the recycling. This is sadly becoming the norm in schooling in California; however, it will be changed if voters vote to pass proposition 30.

Public safety is an underestimated part of our society because no one sees the police cars patrolling your neighborhood at midnight or rushing to a house after they call 911. Some people don’t like the police because they take minor amounts of cannabis or come to your house party and kick out all of your friends, but they are only doing it to keep us safe. I am very appreciative of our public safety and it would be scary to have police start getting laid off because the state has no money to pay them. The $6 billion will not be going to miss use, you can think of it as disaster money to help rebuild a devastated town. The money will be going to keep you, your neighbors and our state safer.

            Why would I want to vote for this because the folks making over $250,000 per year worked hard for their money and why should they be taxed more to pay for other peoples kids? Why should a customer have to pay extra sales tax if they don’t even go to school? To some this may sound like common sense and will not vote to pass prop 30, but I want you to think not just about you and your future but California’s future. Our jobs in technology and engineering are taking off and not stopping and right out of high school no one has what it takes to move right into a job like that; in essence, we need to educate tomorrows leaders so they can continue to propel California’s amazingly diverse job opportunities. 

            The $6 billion dollars getting waved in the air in the faces of all the voters will either come from taxpayers or children’s education to better our future. I hope that you have the decency to not just think about yourself and vote yes on prop 30. Students haven’t done anything to deserve this punishment! If you do vote no, know this: you are hurting everyone else’s future because we are not preparing todays youth for tomorrow’s future.