Thank you, Zell Miller, for sending my kids to college

Today I would like to officially thank Zell Miller for that thing he did in 1993.

He decided to send my four children to college.

At the time, Bess and I were a young couple living in Germany. Only later would we have children, move to Georgia, and learn about the HOPE Scholarship.

Quick! What does HOPE stand for?

(A) Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally.

(B) “I HOPE my kid can graduate high school with a 3.0 GPA and thereby earn a 90-percent tuition scholarship to any state college or university in Georgia that he or she can get accepted to.”

(C) “I HOPE my kid can maintain a 3.0 GPA for four years at one of the top party schools in America.”

(D) All of the above.

More than a decade ago, I heard Zell Miller say that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who want to be and those who want to do.

Which reminds me of this piece of graffiti that Kurt Vonnegut describes in his novel “Deadeye Dick”:

“To be is to do” (Socrates).

“To do is to be” (Jean-Paul Sartre).

“Do be do be do” (Frank Sinatra).

Maybe you’ve seen that on T-shirts. Maybe not.

But anyway, Zell Miller said there are people who strive to be and people who strive to do, and that he was a doer.

I don’t doubt it for a minute.

Politicians say all the time that they’re committed to education and that they want to give the money back to the people and all that.

The first Georgia Lottery ticket was sold in 1993, and what followed was beyond anyone’s expectations. In the first year, the lottery generated more than $1.1 billion.

Miller and lawmakers had planned to make HOPE a partial scholarship, but they responded to the windfall by setting it up to cover full tuition and books and mandatory fees.

They really did give the money back to the people.

At first, it was not available to children from households with an income above $100,000, but in 1995 it became a true merit-based system available to all students who could meet the academic requirements.

In 2011, with lottery revenue catching up to the rising cost of higher education, the state legislature passed a law declaring that HOPE would now cover 90 percent of tuition and no book costs or fees. It also established the Zell Miller Scholarship to cover full tuition for higher caliber students.

At the time, this angered some parents, which was a natural reaction.

One local legislator involved in setting up the original HOPE told me that if the scholarship had begun at 50-percent as originally planned and then was later increased to 90-percent, parents would have been dancing in the streets.

Instead, they felt like victims.

I don’t. Show me another state that has done more to send its students to college.

Certainly we can argue that Georgia should have more needs-based funding. What about children raised in poverty who struggle to make grades because they’re more worried about where they’ll get their next meal or their next pair of shoes? They’ll have a tougher time making HOPE and an even tougher time keeping it.

There should be something else for them.

But am I complaining about what I’m getting?

Absolutely not.

I don’t play the lottery myself – not because I’m morally opposed but because I don’t like my odds.

But I do buy gas and Gatorade and pork skins, and when I’m in the store I love to see folks lining up at the window to buy lottery tickets and scratch-off cards and whatever those games are called.

I want to thank them for sending my children to college, but I stop because I wonder if their own children have gone or are going to college. I wouldn’t want to sound like a jerk and I almost certainly would.

But there’s nothing wrong with thanking the late great Zell Miller, the man who made it all happen.

This story was originally published March 23, 2018 at 8:33 PM with the headline "Thank you, Zell Miller, for sending my kids to college."