Ex-UEA leader fights to save public schools

Several years ago when she taught elementary school in Park City, well before she served her two terms as president of the Utah Education Association, Pat Rusk had a student who kept missing class.

When she summoned the boy's parents to tell them he was slipping behind because of his frequent absences, they explained that their son was skiing a lot because he wanted to win a gold medal in the Olympics.

"Well, then," she said, "I hope he can read the medal."

The story serves as a suitable introduction for a person who is at the front of the vanguard against private school vouchers.

Ms. Rusk sticks up for the kids.

And especially for those kids no one else might be sticking up for.

Her concern isn't with private schools per se, she says. Let them educate whomever chooses the non-public path.

Her concern is with any kind of private school aid that would help reduce America's public school system to second-class status.

"My biggest fear is that a voucher system doesn't really offer reform, just a way out," she says. "It creates a situation where eventually our public schools become a default. I don't want to see that happen here, where public schools are only for somebody else's kids."

As a case in point — make that four cases in point — the career educator, who concluded a four-year presidency of the UEA in 2006, talks about her family hosting foreign exchange students through the years from Poland, Spain, France and Brazil.

"Each one had been in a private school system," she says. "Where they came from, no one goes to public school."

The thought of that happening here — in the land of the free education and the home of those who protect it — leaves her the opposite of speechless. After helping lead the petition drive last spring that got the voucher issue on the ballot, she has been as vocal as a third-grader at recess in explaining why vouchers should be defeated.

"For me personally, it's about making sure kids, all kids, have someone sticking up for them," she says in explaining why she has chosen to speak out so passionately and independently. "Our public schools are the one place where everyone has a chance, where you can make something of yourself,