Education or Economy?

While I was doing a little business research, I went to the website high-schools.com. There you can put in a school district or city and get information like the names of schools, whether they're public or private, enrollment and percentage of students on free or reduced lunches. This last statistic is very interesting.

What I learned is that my school district has seven public high schools and all have a free/reduced lunch percentage greater than 33%. Five of the seven are 44% or higher. Just for comparison, I looked at an area I know to have a fairly strong economy (Virginia Beach, VA) which had 9 of it's 11 schools below 33% free or reduced lunch.

Next I looked to Mobile, AL, an area considered by many here in Pensacola to be booming economically. Not a single public high school lower than 42% on free/reduced lunch. In fact only two were below 50% and some were 90%. Astonishing!

This told me a number of things. Among them;
1. People in this area aren't working.
2. While we complain that parents are apathetic about their child's education, it shouldn't surprise us when the majority of those people are receiving government benefits and not working in positions sufficient to support their families.

Often times people will complain the school system and teachers aren't doing enough. I say; if those kids are going to graduate having few to no local business/job opportunities from which to gain experience, what do we expect the school system to do?

So, what to do from where we are? I would suggest we offer major tax incentives to bring manufacturing jobs to the area. Start there. Yes those jobs may be dirty. But do we have a ready workforce for high-tech jobs? I think not. So bring in the plants that will offer skills and labor to start building from.

Once the process is started it is up to the local workforce to get moving and take up those jobs. This may require cutting benefits to people who could be working, but aren't. A controversial move for sure, but without these measures, we face generations of unemployed people and kids with no hope for a bright future.

What do you think?