MONTGOMERY, Ala. — The Democratic and Republican candidates for Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District, Shomari Figures and Caroleene Dobson, shared dueling visions for how they would improve education Wednesday.
At a candidate luncheon organized by the Alabama League of Municipalities, both candidates were given the opportunity to speak to how they would best help Alabamians of District 2, which was recently redrawn by a federal court to increase its Black population.
“I’m running to fight for your family, for my family, for safer communities, and for more opportunities for our kids,” said Dobson, the first to speak.
On education, Dobson argued that the bureaucracy in the federal education system had grown too large, and was an inefficient use of taxpayer dollars. Instead, Dobson advocated for more local control of those dollars earmarked for public education by allowing money to follow students to public school alternatives.
“I will fight to ensure that our federal education dollars follow the students and the teachers, and not bureaucracy,” she said.
“We have got to fight to ensure that parents in this district, especially low-income parents, are empowered with the resources that they need to make choices about where and how their children get educated.”
She also called for students to be instilled with a greater “sense of unity” and “purpose,” particularly in their view of the United States, comments similar to those made by former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions last year to an Alabama legislative body.
“If we have any hope of surviving as a country, especially in the face of global threats, we have got to instill in our young people the knowledge that America, even though it is not and will never be perfect, is still the greatest force for good in this world, and that freedom is worth fighting for,” she said.
She later told Alabama Daily News that she was in favor of having the U.S. Department of Education “dramatically downsized,” with those dollars being diverted to states and local school boards. She championed the CHOOSE Act, signed into law earlier this year, as an example of giving more local control to education dollars.
The CHOOSE Act will allow for eligible Alabama families to use up to $7,000 per student a year in money earmarked for public education toward private schools, and $2,000 per student in home schools. Lawmakers set aside $100 million for the program in its first year.
“Even within this district, you have a wide variety of availability and accessibility to education, some counties only have a handful of schools, so choice doesn’t look the same from county to county,” Dobson told ADN.
“That’s why we need more funding on the state and local level. We really need to empower parents to have the choice when it comes to equipping their young people to succeed.”
Conversely, Figures offered a near-opposite vision of how to improve education in Alabama, and highlighted teacher shortage and retention struggles, as well as their lack of mandated parental leave, as a reason to work to increase funding for public education.
He also argued that increasing funding for public education was the best path toward drawing corporate investment into the state, which he said a well-educated population is a strong draw for.
“Regardless of how you feel about private, charter and public schools, there ain’t enough private and charter schools to educate the masses in the state of Alabama,” Figures said.
“The vast majority of our future workers will be educated in our public education system. We cannot have a workforce development conversation if we’re talking about depleting resources from our greatest workforce development program, our public school system.”
When asked how he would work to increase teacher pay as a member of Congress, Figures told ADN there were tools members of Congress had at their disposal to incentivize states to raise teacher wages.
“The federal government, obviously they don’t set teacher pay, most of your education funding is local, but there is certain funding that the federal government can kick in that can help in recruiting and retaining teachers, and just general education infrastructure,” he told ADN.
Figures also stressed the need to update education infrastructure in District 2, with many school buildings in Alabama’s lower-income communities in a state of disrepair, with reports of schools in Sumter County having roofs close to collapsing and inadequate air conditioning.
“We have too many schools in this district where kids are still going into buildings that were built with New Deal money in post-World War II; now, they’ve been updated to a degree, but they’re still certainly not new buildings,” Figures told ADN.
“In the state of Alabama, where teachers are paid in the bottom third of teachers in the country, and we don’t have benefits like paid time off for teachers when they decide to have a family of their own, we should at least be able to try to leverage federal government resources to provide a modernized education environment that’s more attractive to teachers.”
The general election will be held Nov. 5. The voter registration deadline to participate is Oct. 21, and the last day to apply for an absentee ballot by mail, Oct. 29, and in person, Oct. 31.