CEO of the Retirement Systems of Alabama (RSA) David Bronner recently leveraged the RSA’s newsletter to advocate against education savings accounts (ESAs), which he claimed would jeopardize public schools and leave private schools unaccountable. However, Bronner sent all three of his children to private school at a cost of thousands per year.
Bronner’s three children, Allison, George and Courtney, have all been listed as alumni in past editions of the magazine of Montgomery Academy (MA), Visions.
MA is a co-ed K-12 private school in Montgomery. According to MA’s website, tuition for its high school students is currently over $17,000 per school year.
Allison Bronner died in 2011. The Jefferson County Coroner’s office ruled her death due to natural causes. At the time, Allison, 25, studied law at the University of Alabama (UA) Law School.
According to an obituary in Visions that year, Allison graduated from MA in 2004. The obituary lists George Bronner as an MA alumni from the Class of 1996 and Courtney as an alumnus from the Class of 1997.
In another edition of Visions, MA announced the birth of Courtney’s child under a section titled “Class Notes: Keeping up with Alumni.”
Recently, Gov. Kay Ivey said ESAs would be a priority of her administration in next year’s legislative session. With an ESA, parents can use state education dollars to help send their children to private schools or home-school their children if they don’t think public school is the best option for their child.
In this year’s legislative session, lawmakers filed the Parental Rights in Children’s Education (PRICE) Act, but the bill never received a vote.
Bronner said in the RSA’s newsletter, the Advisor, that ESAs are an “extreme version of school choice” and that the PRICE Act would have removed $657 million from public schools in Alabama every year. He claimed the bill lacked special protections for special needs children.
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