School Choice Supporters Start Trend

Milwaukee - Proponents of Milwaukee's School Choice Program have started an avalanche of a trend through their innovative use of a green ribbon to represent their cause.

School Choice supporters have long been urging Governor Doyle to "lift the cap" on school choice enrollment in Milwaukee. School Choice is a program where low-income students are able to use Wisconsin tax dollars to pay for their attendance at a private school.

As a way to publicly show their support for this program, organizers utilized the remarkably simple idea of a green ribbon. This ribbon has been seen far and wide, on places like Boots & Sabers. Before long, you couldn't drive down a street in Milwaukee without seeing a green ribbon on a car's antenna.

Several other groups have begun to copy this ingenious and original idea to further their own cause. While not as prominent as the school choice group, a number of families who have soldiers abroad decided to use a yellow ribbon to show their support for troops.

Some skeptics don't expect such copy-cat trends to catch on. They often site the Lance Armstrong Foundation's yellow "Live Strong" bracelets that were quickly copied with a color for everything imaginable. Much of those copy-cat attempts were an overwhelming failure in comparison to the original yellow bracelet. Similarly, these yellow ribbons and other copy-cats are not expected to gather any attention.

Also joining this group of failures is likely to be the red ribbon appearing on clothes in support of curing AIDS. The general consensus is that issues like soldiers in combat and AIDS cannot come close to matching the importance to our lives as the need to lift the cap on school choice enrollment.