By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org
    
GREENVILLE, Ala. – Alabama’s Butler County Board of Education recently passed a resolution opposing lawmakers’ efforts to allow charter schools into the Yellowhammer State.
    
According to the Greenville Advocate, the board cited the usual reasons for opposing charter schools: they would drain too many resources from traditional schools and have too little oversight.
    
If the board’s resolution sounded to taxpayers like it could have been written by the state’s teachers union, that’s because it was.
    
Julie Sellers Swann, attorney and UniServ Director of the Alabama Education Association, told the Advocate that she “suggested a resolution to (the superintendent) and offered some language on the resolution.”
    
Swann added that the superintendent “took the initiative to craft a specific resolution for the county and propose it to the board – which then adopted it.”
    
In other words, the superintendent copied Swann’s homework, but changed a few of the words around. How classy.
    
But what makes the board’s wrongheaded resolution even more pathetic is that it’s based on misinformation. The union’s warnings about charter schools are gross exaggerations of what is actually being proposed by Alabama lawmakers, as a recent newspaper editorial confirmed. 
    
” … [U]nder the Senate proposal, converting low-performing traditional schools to charter schools would be the only way charters would be allowed in the state,” noted an AL.com editorial. “So, brand-new charter schools would not suddenly pop up down the road from healthy traditional schools, from which they could siphon off students.”
    
Apparently, Butler County school board members didn’t learn what most of us learned in elementary school: If you’re going to copy somebody’s homework, make sure it’s from someone who actually knows what they’re doing.