Year after year, Loudoun County is named the richest county in America.  At the same time, schools are never sufficiently funded and it is a constant struggle to get the education budget approved.  Loudoun schools do not even provide after-school activity buses, funding for clubs, or, most recently, technology for students.

The 2015-2016 school year included the beginning of the Bring Your Own Technology Program which encourages students to bring their own personal devices to use for instructional purposes.  However, the greatest flaw in this plan is that not every student owns a technological device which leads to an unhealthy learning atmosphere in which some people are put at a disadvantage due to no fault of their own.  Since the money given to individual schools is barely enough to cover operation costs, let alone being able to buy new learning resources, schools have had to get creative to secure funds. For example, in an attempt to resolve this issue, Dominion entered the WTOP Click for Kids Contest to win $20,000 and purchase technology for the school.

Although Dominion won the contest, the manner in which they did so and the fact that they even had to enter in the first place is truly saddening.  Every day, students were repeatedly urged to vote using as many email addresses as possible and to share the contest with their family and friends.  Additionally, Principal John Brewer went to other local high schools and offered students candy in order to vote for Dominion.  Even though it is normal to encourage voting and prioritize winning, it is definitely not appropriate to beg people from other schools to participate and to place so much pressure on the faculty and student body to ensure a win.

Even after winning the WTOP contest, the money won was not enough to fulfill Dominion’s technology plan and they turned to crowd-funding to raise the remaining $15,000.  Junior Justin Tandon started a GoFundMe fundraiser, urging students, staff, and the community to literally just give money to the school.  Dominion featured it on the morning announcements and even put it on their homepage, stating, “Just $10 per Titan will finish the deal”.

While the amount of effort put in is admirable, the whole point of people paying taxes is so that students in the United States are able to receive a free education.  When a school is forced to begin begging for cash, it shows not only a failure of the county’s ability to budget appropriately but also reveals a greater issue, the lack of importance placed on education in America, which affects hundreds of thousands of schools nationwide.  Running a school is extremely expensive and obviously only so much money can be allotted to each student per year but new solutions have to be found and funds need to be used more efficiently in order to allow schools to focus on actually giving students a decent education rather than trying desperately to make money.