Issue Position: Education

Issue Position

Virginia invests heavily in creating and supporting a well-qualified workforce. We maintain the best education system in the world, whether it is providing a strong foundation at the K-12 level, providing advanced job training at our community colleges, or encouraging innovative new research at our public colleges and universities.

Locally, I have been working to attract jobs to our region by improving our area job training programs. I have worked with our local officials and our community colleges to locate new satellite branches of CVCC and Dabney Lancaster Community College in Amherst and Buena Vista. I also have worked to enact legislation to provide scholarships for community college students who want to continue their studies at four-year colleges. Securing a top-quality education for our students will ensure a highly-trained workforce for local employers, and it will help keep our young people from being forced to leave this area to find work.

I believe that the focus of education should be learning, not administrative bureaucracy. We need to make sure the money spent in schools gets to the classroom where it can impact results because nothing less than the future of children is at stake. For this reason, I sponsored legislation in 2012 to require two-thirds of all education dollars go toward the classroom.

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