Ceretto circulates 'Kids Before Cons' petition against free tuition for convicts plan

Petition can be found at http://bit.ly/KidsB4Cons.

Assemblyman John Ceretto, R-C-I-Lewiston, who came out against the plan to give free college tuition to convicts this week, is now circulating a petition against the plan. The "Kids Before Cons" petition, which is being sponsored by the entire Assembly Minority Conference, already has almost 4,000 signatures in just a few days. The petition can be found at http://bit.ly/KidsB4Cons, as well as on Ceretto's Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/pages/John-D-Ceretto/.

"My office has received a lot of calls and emails in opposition to the idea of giving free college education to convicts. Together with my Assembly Minority colleagues, we are organizing that opposition into one cohesive voice. We are united in the belief that New York must put 'Kids Before Cons,' and help the working-class families who go into serious debt to pay for college," Ceretto said. "As a father whose kids have taken out loans and worked to put themselves through college, I know that hard-working families deserve help before people who have been incarcerated for breaking the law. I'm working with my Assembly Minority colleagues to put a stop to this unfair plan. We need to focus on the real problem that college education is now unaffordable for everybody."

Since the plan to give convicts a free college education was announced, Ceretto has been working to stop this plan from being passed by organizing opposition. Ceretto said he believes a better use of this money would be to decrease the cost of college overall. One avenue to accomplish this would be putting it toward increasing funding for the Tuition Assistance Program for the first time since 2001.