“I Believe That Children Are The Future”

“Culture wars” are losing in Texas school districts because the Texas legislature can’t fund schools. Nobody cares about textbooks or CRT anymore. They’re trying to decide what campuses to close.

The local school district has a $35 million hole in its budget because the Lege hasn’t funded public schools for 2024-2025. This has led to near-weekly school board meetings (the usual schedule is monthly) while they decide how much personnel they have to cut and which campuses to close. They punted on that issue this week when the meeting was overwhelmed with angry parents protesting the vote to close a particular campus. But the axe is going to fall. Classrooms are going to grow more crowded.

And, I suspect, people are going to continue to vote for the Republicans who did this. You can’t fix stupid. 

Meanwhile, school bonds passed 6 years ago to fund replacing old schools with new buildings are on hold because those schools may be closed now and not reopened for years.

Who has time to worry now about a book in a school library no kid is going to read?

And the Lege starts its fourth useless special session today, still seeking vouchers for private schools and offering (still) to barely give any money to public schools (despite one-third of the budget surplus being local school taxes), and that only as a sop to say vouchers won’t take money from public schools. Except they already have. The issue is entirely the creation of two rich West Texas oilmen who own the Governor and the Texas Senate, and are determined to break the public school system. Whether this crisis across the state is sufficient to draw attention to them and make sunlight the best disinfectant, remains to be seen.

Meanwhile the largest school district in the state, having been taken over by the State under the authority of a gubernatorial appointee, is bleeding teachers even as the takeover was supposed to fix the district and help students. The school board there was appointed by the man appointed to run the district now. No word on whether they are worried about school finances since, really, they weren’t installed to worry about them. Nor do they seem too concerned about the sharp decline in teachers available to teach. I’m sure if they have to close some campuses, they’ll just do it and ignore the parents. It’s not like the school board represents the parents anymore.

But it’s alright. This is all being done for the children.