My name is Eric Broyles of Morehead City. I am the Vice Chairman of the Crystal Coast Tea Party Patriots.  I appreciate you allowing me to speak tonight.  The greatest gift a parent, community, or nation can give a child is a quality education.  A quality education not only prepares an individual for the future, but is an investment into the future success of a society or nation.  There are several elements that determine an individual’s quality of learning and education, which are:

·    Nutritional meal
·    Quality Teacher
·    Parental support and coaching
·    Lesson plan and learning materials
·    Educational setting

I am sure there are many more elements that can be added to the list, but the first two are the most important.  A hungry child does not learn and a bad teacher does not educate.  Now onto the main purpose of this speech, which address school system accountability and reporting of information to parents and taxpayers.

Over the past several months, we have heard a lot of discussion from both sides of the aisle about classroom sizes and how it impacts the quality of education our children receive.  Yet when you visit Carteret County School Boards website, it becomes a challenging adventure for any citizen to obtain information on class sizes and scholastic performance at the classroom/teacher level.  I do not know why the information is not openly and readily disclosed, but parents and taxpayers alike have a right to know the overall scholastic performance of a class and its teacher.  Individual student testing and performance information should never be released in accordance with current regulation or privacy laws.

As a taxpayer and parent, I am asking that our School Board and superintendent publish the classroom size statistics and overall scholastic scores of teachers in an easily accessible and readable format yearly on its website.  This will create a level of accountability at the public and tax payer level.  We do not want another Detroit, where 47% of the population is estimated to be functionally illiterate.  Openness and full disclosure has always been the best policy.  As many speakers pointed out the other night at the Commissioner’s meeting, we owe this to our children and their future prosperity.