Issue Position: Fight for our Children's Future - Education
Issue Position
Thomas Jefferson once said, "An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people." When it comes to education, Mississippi has consistently ranked last at everything from high school graduation rates to teacher pay and classroom investment. Our children's future -- and our state's future -- depends on the quality of the education that they receive. Good, well-funded, high-performing schools will attract new industry and more jobs to our community.
To change the direction of public education in Mississippi, drastic reforms will have to be made -- starting at the top. In the state with some of the lowest teacher salaries in the country, Mississippi's state superintendent of public education is the highest paid in the country, collecting a state salary of $300,000 per year. Even more rattling, in 2018 the Mississippi Department of Education cancelled a $5.5 million software contract but only after nearly $1 million of taxpayer money had already been spent, effectively sending $1 million that could have been invested in our schools straight down the drain. This type of wasteful spending at the top hurts our children and takes much needed funding out of our classrooms.
Jansen will fight to ensure that the schools of District 106 and across Mississippi are properly funded and our children are afforded the education that they deserve. He will work to make sure that Mississippi's teachers are paid what they deserve by fighting to increase teacher pay to at least the regional average. To do this, he believes we must start by tackling the wasteful spending at the Department of Education and throughout state government. He will also introduce legislation that will cap the salaries of administrators in Jackson so that our money flows into the classrooms and not the pockets of special interests and cronies.
Additionally, our students and teachers are stressed to the max by overburdensome state testing requirements. As State Representative, Jansen will fight to reduce mandatory state tests. Education should be individualized, and teachers should be able to do their jobs without micromanagement from cronies and politicians in Jackson and Washington, D.C..
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