The Alabama Supreme Court has upheld a state program that gives tax credits to help families pay for private school.
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the law does not violate restrictions on giving funds to private, religious schools because the money goes to parents.
Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange says in a news release this afternoon “The Supreme Court’s ruling makes it crystal clear that Alabama parents have the right to school choice in seeking the best education for their children.”
The law gives income-tax credits to help parents pay for private school if their child attends a failing public one. It also gives tax credits for donations to scholarship programs.
Justices also ruled that the manner in which Republican legislators passed the bill was legal. Legislators introduced the plan in conference committee and approved it the same night.
The city of Selma is preparing to remember the fiftieth anniversary of the attack known as "Bloody Sunday." Today also marks fifty years since the funeral of civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson.
His death at the hands of an Alabama State Police Trooper is considered one of the reasons Dr. Martin Luther King came to Selma to help organize the voting rights marches.
Vera Jenkins Booker is the nurse that tended to Jackson when he was brought into the Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma…
“He lived about eight days, seven or eight days and he passed away. It really bothered because I was just so sure he would be alright and I has assured him that up until the end, you know “you’re going to be alright” kind of bothered me.”
Booker was also called upon to help civil rights marchers who were beaten by state troopers as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday.
It’s being called the biggest vote in Tuscaloosa County in thirty years.
Voters are heading to the polls to decide whether or not to renew a series of property taxes with the dollars going toward education. County voters will say yes or no on a one and a half million property tax and a four mill tax.
City voters will decide fifteen and a half million tax for schools. One million means your tax bill goes up by one dollar for every thousand dollars of assessed property value.
Dr. Liz Swinford is the Superintendent for Tuscaloosa County Schools. She says the renewal of these taxes will fund things like pre-k and a virtual learning center…
“But at the end of the day 2 million dollars is a lot of money. By the tax passing we just keep the same financing, the same money, the same amount of income pretty much level. We just really need it.”
By law, the school tax in Tuscaloosa County has to be renewed every thirty years.