Monday, May 01, 2023

Mayday! Mayday! (In Which I Finally Try Twitter's Search Function)

After the local ISD brought so much attention to school funding in Texas, other districts tried to organize a "May Day" (as in "m'aider!" Hey, Texas had a French Legation back when it was a republic!)  So I searched Twitter, briefly, to see what I could find (Avoiding "Mayday" as a key word because this isn't my first keyword search).  What follows are the results of that search, edited to highlight as many school funding related tweets as possible, along with some like well, this one: Because all public schools are like this, right? Yeah, context kinda matters. We certainly deserve better than those tweets about a teacher suspended 6 years ago for being stupid in class.  Most of the tweets did seem to be from Dallas/North Texas.  Which either indicates a greater interest in the topic there, or a greater use of Twitter.  OTOH, my search was not that comprehensive or careful, so a lack of tweets from South Texas, West Texas, the Panhandle or the Trans-Pecos region, shouldn't be taken as indicating anything except my weak Twitter-fu. I gotta say: Texas Monthly is mostly the house organ for the very people who put their kids in private schools. So.... Just dropping this in to note it's an argument for a new "Rome": Where citizenship has privileges, and non-citizens are treated as non-persons. Oh, and it's a direct violation of the 14th Amendment. But "old times there are not forgotten."  There are also lots of tweets I left out concerning the Ten Commandments in schools (still only passed by the Senate; so far), which is also a direct violation of the 1st Amendment;  so... Yes, some of these tweets are repetitive. But they are going out to people hyper-locally, and repetition keeps the message straight. I picked more for geographic diversity than originality. Well, I'd certainly like to think so, and that ordinary voters will see it that way, too. But as we said when I was a kid: "Wish in one hand and...spit...in the other. See which one fills up fastest." It's a one year pay raise; in a state budget that covers two years at a time. After that one year? School districts have to pick up the slack. The same ones that are fighting just to get enough money back from the state to pay for what they do for the next two years. Tyler ISD is in East Texas. It's GOP land. Abbott went there to promote school vouchers, but even the people in East Texas aren't buying. Tyler is not a "blue" big urban haven, and it brought in ISD's from small towns around East Texas. That one's gonna hurt. Feature, not bug. Our two local Senators told local ISD reps in a meeting that they got federal funding, why wasn't that enough? 

I posted these as they came up. I could have organized them by subject, but that tends to make things rather dull.  It's a ladle full of what may be an empty bucket, or an overflowing bathtub.  I understand the ISD effort is meant to go on for a few days, at least.  If it stirs up parents and concerned citizens around the state (East Texas would really be a bombshell in these matters; and rural ISD's aren't real excited about decreased school funding when the public schools are the only game in town.  Those people are the reason the GOP is in charge of the Lege, and the legislators know it.), that reaction won't show up for a few days, and may not show up on Twitter. Or it may, and I won't find it.  The two local senators told the ISD reps to "tell your people on Twitter to back off."  So just this once, I'd like to see a large Twitter response to this campaign.

It may be the only way to save Texas public schools.
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