My name is Cameron Sloop, and I am a senior at Jesse Carson High School. I am very politically active in the community and I’ve been doing research on the different problems facing North Carolina.

Education seems to be the top issue everyone on both sides wants to fix, which makes me truly wonder why we cannot do it.

I believe in county education rather than state or federal. Allow the counties to renew their schools and decide on curriculum, the type of classes certain schools have and much more. I am also very against standardized state testing. I have seen the effects on students. Let me just say it’s not very good. It lowers students’ self esteem and causes depression in many students.

So I am proposing this: I am thinking of starting a company called “Vision 2030,” which cleans up inner cities and advocates for change in education and more funding for teachers and faculty members. But what I’m hoping to get out of this is cleaning up cities and making them all safer. Once you educate people, life will only get easier for everyone.

Who knows, we could have our next Albert Einstein. Any person of any political party can join this but my vision is to have our education system fixed and poverty gone by 2030.

— Cameron Sloop

Salisbury