Shantelai Pettit knows first-hand just how bad some schools in Missouri can be. She moved to the Kansas City area from California when she was eleven and almost immediately discovered how far behind her new classmates were.
“Everything they were learning here I had already learned a couple of years ago,” she said. “So continuing in the public school system kind of dumbed me down.
Shantelai wants a better education and future for her three-year-old son, but does not know how she will achieve that financially.
“When I think back on that and think about my son being raised in the same school district that I graduated from, I want my son to have better opportunities,” she said. “I don’t think that I will be able to afford private school.”
Instead, Shantelai said she is considering the possibilities of homeschooling her son but has a number of reservations about how she will manage that.
“I’m concerned it’ll be too time-consuming with me being a single parent and his dad being deceased,” she said. “I have a good support system but at the end of the day I just think it’ll be me and him and I am concerned about it being time-consuming. I am concerned about the resources and me being able to teach him everything he needs to learn with me not having a higher degree.”
Shantelai said a program like an ESA would make it much easier for her as a single mom to afford to create an education for her son that would help avoid the problems she faced herself when she was in public school.