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Texas Jeff

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  1. Honestly pair it with an additional $500 million per year spending in school infrastructure and a promise to get rid of the sticks in the road and I'm all in... I know that the school and the city are different taxing authorities with different budgets but I would totally vote for that.
  2. I am fine building safe reasonable housing with food, medical care and support. Anyone that is in that situation that wants a path out of it should have a path. Anyone who is not mentally with us should have a path to get help. It's harder to decide how to help folks that have given up and that is their lifestyle. I feel that Austin is trying to go it alone without support from the state or support from surrounding communities. The ask seems to get bigger every year. I don't see progress. The current ask is about $100 million per year to support about 6000 homeless. That is over $16,000 per year per person and it is more than we spend on education per child in this community. Our suburbs and state need to chip in.
  3. Austin Transit Partnership issued a timeline last year that has trains running as early as 2033. I predict they won't get money from the Trump admin. There was never an unlimited pile of money for transit and Austin is competing with everyone else in the country for slices. Seems like the Feds are cutting stuff so I would suspect there will be a big reveal where ATP says that they are not getting a federal match for the train, so we are going to have to scale back the scale back ... or increase the tax going to ATP and pay for it ourselves. San Antonio got a transit project 60% funded but it's bus rapid transit, not rail, and it's an order of magnitude cheaper.
  4. Liiving through the last 10 years or so, it seems to me that the more we spend on homelessness: 1. The more homeless we seem to have here in Austin ... when they count it seems to go up. 2. The fewer homeless I see anywhere else in the region ... nice for them because their spending on homeless can go to zero. 3. The more entrenched "homeless spending" becomes in Austin ... meaning more and more orgs and salaries are dependent on homeless spending. 4. The more homeless I see, particularly on streets around the rapid bus line routes. The Mobile Loaves and Fishes guy seems to have a plan to help. Everything else seems, just from what I see, to be creating a homeless industry. I don't see our tax dollars creating solutions to problems, but I may not be looking hard enough.
  5. Well they are selling the old Rosedale campus and the closed Brooke Elementary site to the highest bidder, to raise cash that they can then immediately burn through on their way to zero. No district benefits to be had. They are doing something like what you describe at the old Anita Coy facility. I wasn't in favor of the change in zoning, but I will say it has advantages that Austin ISD could use it in their favor. They could buy properties close to their schools and redevelop them as 2-3 houses per lot. Then be the landlord to their teachers and staff. I *think* that would remove the properties from the tax base, so they wouldn't pay taxes on the property, which might make it even cheaper. The district could build a bunch of similar properties close to many schools and provide some teachers with a walkable commute and cheaper housing. They could give them a little less in pay because of this benefit, and spread out the savings to others.
  6. I believe a district is limited to 50 cents of tax rate towards I&S. That does not tell you how much in bonds that will finance, because interest rates vary. So, a district can take its tax base, and each year raise up to 50 cents for each $100 in the tax base. They can use that money to pay the interest and principal on bonds. Austin ISD is currently around 12-13 cents in I&S, so they have a lot of room to raise more if they wished.
  7. About school finance, you always have to remember that there are two buckets of money. One bucket, maintenance and operations or M&O, is subject to recapture and goes towards daily expenses like school supplies and paying teachers. The other one, interest and sinking or I&S, goes towards paying off debt created by bonds. Bonds are issued to build stuff like school buildings and football stadiums and I&S money pays them off, like a mortgage. So any time you talk about a vote or a tax rate change, you need to understand which bucket you are talking about to understand recapture. Last year, Austin ISD held a tax rate election so that they could add "copper pennies" to the tax rate. This was for the M&O bucket. This was NOT a bond. Nothing will be built using the money. Since it was subject to recapture, 75% of the copper penny money was going to go to the state. This was not a surprise to anyone. The district taxed you $170 million per year so that they could raise $40 million per year, but that gave them $40 million to spend per year. They spent about half on teacher raises and about half on other stuff. $130 million per year went to recapture, which went to the state, which went to the general fund, which is not required to be spent on education. Austin ISD is maxed out on their M&O tax rate, their "golden pennies" (money they get to keep without recapture) and their "copper pennies" (money they get to keep after recapture). They have a $110 million budget deficit and they are going to run out of money in about 15 months if they do not reduce spending. In 2017 and 2022, Austin ISD held a bond election so that they could renovate and replace buildings throughout the district. These WERE bond elections. The money was not subject to recapture. About 13 cents of your tax rate goes towards paying off these projects. The bulk of the 2022 projects are in the 'eastern crescent' of Austin, which includes many of the schools that now have an "F" rating ... and could be closed in the next few years.
  8. It is both accurate and IMHO a bit misleading. It is accurate in that it shows the A and F rated schools in Austin, and it clearly states that in the label on the bottom. And, we know that TEA's rating system is biased so that wealthy areas are likely to get an A or a B and poorer areas are likely to get a D or an F. The division the picture shows probably extends beyond the ISD boundaries and probably exists in every city in Texas. Rich areas get the A's. Poor areas get the F's. It is misleading in that it omits schools that made a B-D score, so that it looks like Austin only has A and F schools. In Austin ISD: * 30 schools got an F * 19 schools got a D (and I will let you guess where most of them are) * 12 schools got a C (a group that includes Travis, Crockett and Akins, southside HS's are doing pretty well for their demographic) * 28 schools got a B (and I will let you guess where most of them are, but also point out Mendez MS as a southeast in-district charter with horrible demographics got a B) * 24 schools got an A So 54 dots are shown on the map, but 59 are not. The picture makes it look like the district is perfectly split between A and F. It's true that there is a split in Austin, but that same split likely occurs in other cities because of the way demographics factors into TEA scores, and the picture does not show any schools with moderate grades, which represents over half of the schools in the district.
  9. I was curious about eco-dis population vs TEA score, so I created this for Austin ISD from the TEA data. The TEA translates the score to A-F grades just like you remember from school, 90-100 is an A, 80-89 is a B, 70-79 is a C, 60-69 is a D, below 60 is an F. Five F's in a row means the school closes and/or TEA can take over the school district, and a school needs a C to break the chain of F's. What is TEA really measuring here? Seems like they are locking low eco-dis schools into an A/B score and locking high eco-dis schools into B-F with a chance of closure. This would be OK if they were using this data to try to help the bottom dots, but they are using it to close schools, force chaos with school mergers and take over school districts.
  10. About 70% of the LASA kids come from those next four schools. If the LASA kids were at their "home" schools, those next four would probably be "A" grades. My kids went to Austin High and I've compared notes with parents from the other three in the 2-5 group. They are all about the same, which the scores reflect. If you are lucky, your kid runs into the perfect teacher that they click with and love the subject and your kid is off to the races. My kids had some great band directors and band kids that gave them a group to hang out with and some great core class teachers that helped them find their passions, but it's so individual that I can't really say the school did it ... I would say the specific teachers did it and the admin helped by hiring those folks. The tough reality for AISD is that 30 schools got an "F". These grades are from the 2022-23 school year. More years are coming out soon. It's going to be very difficult to get all "F" schools back to a "C" or closed and merged so that no school ends up with five "F"s in a row, which could trigger a takeover. Ironically, a lot of the schools that were either rebuilt in the 2017 bond or are under rebuild as part of the 2022 bond got an "F" or a "D". Meaning that the district could be cutting a ribbon on a new school building and closing the school at about the same time. Frustrating...
  11. I read elsewhere that rising Dobie 6th graders will not be sent to Lamar for 6th grade. They will be rezoned elsewhere. This just affects rising 7th and 8th graders. Not sure if that is true or not ... please correct me if I am wrong. But if it is, then Lamar will get Dobie kids for two grades, then one grade, then none. Not great for overcrowding at Lamar but eventually the Dobie kids will track to a different school. Of course, the schools closest to Dobie are also receiving low scores, so there could still be be a contagion for years of schools shutting down for poor grades and the kids there getting shifted to other schools farther away that are full.
  12. Feeder patterns: https://www.austinisd.org/sites/default/files/dept/planning-asset-management/2024-25_FMP_Feeder_Pattern_20240904(1).pdf Attendance boundaries: https://www.austinisd.org/modules/custom/schools/maps/schools.html Webb is zoned to four schools: McCallum, LBJ, Northeast, Navarro. Not every middle school has attendance boundaries. On the east side, Gus Garcia (all boys), Sadler Means (all girls), and Marshall (open two years) do not have boundaries. Sadler Means and Burnet MS are currently receiving brand new buildings. Marshall was built as part of the 2017 bond.
  13. My crazy idea: Close Northeast HS and move all of the kids to LBJ HS. LBJ would be almost full and demographics show that it would slightly shrink over the next ten years, but it would be lot more full that it is planned to be. LBJ's projected enrollment in 2033 is 537, for a school with a capacity of 1947. Keep the International HS at the Northeast campus and open a new middle school at Northeast. Move the bond money that was to be spent on Dobie to the new MS at Northeast. The combo of the International HS and the new MS would benefit from both the $36 million that was to go to Dobie and the $117 million that is being spent at the Northeast campus. This gives the district room to expand if other middle schools in the area fail, and there are others on the list that could fail in the next few years just like Dobie. Dobie is 3 miles from the Northeast campus versus 6 miles from the Lamar campus. It also gives the east side a strong vertical, since Marshall and the new Northeast MS would feed to LBJ. Put a lot of resources into the new MS to try to get it up to at least a C rating, so that the district is not in the same situation five years from now.
  14. McCallum and all of the AISD high schools are getting a new turf field with lights. Baseball and softball are also getting lights but not turf. Everyone is getting their track brought up to reasonable standards, although not everyone has room for an 8-lane track. Some are six lanes. The trustees are voting this month to approve the vendor. Construction has already started at LBJ and Northeast, and the other schools will follow. It's probably not going to be ready for the next school year but it should be done by the following school year. The fields will have power and water so that the schools can set up fans or hydration stations to help keep the kids cool. I'm not sure if it made the final design, but I know at one point they were considering a sand based product for fill rather than the black rubber tires because it reduces the temps on the field significantly. There is a space at each field for a small press box. And I do mean a small one. They are either going to put that in, or if the budget does now allow, leave space for a small press box in a future bond. McCallum has some serious issues with drainage that constrained what was possible with their field design, but they did shoehorn it in. You can see the designs for the fields in the Turf and Fields CAT folder that I linked.
  15. Not sure how many are in the fine arts program, but here's the list of who attended Lamar from where in the most recent demographics report: Kids who lived in the Lamar district that attended Lamar: 807 Others transferred from: Bedichek: 2 Burnet: 28 Covington: 2 Dobie: 26 Kealing: 54 Martin: 35 Murchison: 48 O. Henry: 35 Out of district: 33 Webb: 26 Total others: 289
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