That is good to see. Thank you for providing that!
Just sent you a response right before this one, and it actually applies to this. I had mentioned Rick Perry probably did expect too much of too many parents.
These steps are not particularly difficult, but this process does involve parental involvement, and many parents are not involved enough to go out of their way even this much. Those parents who have already given up a lot of their parental rights by putting their children in government schools, handing their kids over to the government in partial to raise, are not always the most involved parents to begin with. Not all, but many. If they don’t care enough already than to relinquish their oversight during school hours to the government, why should we really expect them to care enough to opt-out?
I wish he would have found another way to have kept this at a local level in his quest to accept the federal funds (which would have come with federal oversight), and as I mentioned in my last response to you, his persistence of keeping it local IN THE WAY HE TRIED, has turned out to be a PR nightmare for him.
My only complaint is that this should not constitute a “crony” charge to it when Merck, regardless of their lobbyists, was getting paid by ALL the states, whether they were getting their funds through a conservative, local funding process or through a tax-payer funded processes as most of the other states implemented.
Perhaps 'crony' is the wrong word. Not sure what the right one is. The following is from an AP story : Texas Gov. Orders Anti-Cancer Vaccine reported in WaPo, Friday, February 2, 2007:
Merck is bankrolling efforts to pass state laws across the country mandating Gardasil for girls as young as 11 or 12. It doubled its lobbying budget in Texas and has funneled money through Women in Government, an advocacy group made up of female state legislators around the country.
Perry has ties to Merck and Women in Government. One of the drug company's three lobbyists in Texas is Mike Toomey, Perry's former chief of staff. His current chief of staff's mother-in-law, Texas Republican state Rep. Dianne White Delisi, is a state director for Women in Government.
The governor also received $6,000 from Merck's political action committee during his re-election campaign.