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Larry T. Spider

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Everything posted by Larry T. Spider

  1. And who exactly is looking out for AISD’s interests at the state level to make that happen? I almost got laughed off the board last spring, but this is my pipe dream scenario where it gets fixed. The state takes over and wants to look like the heroes solving all of AISD’s problems. They will be under a microscope even more than with Houston for all the political reasons. They get the formula tweaked or some type of carve out that benefits AISD. Then they fix a lot of the financial problems that the district could have solved on their own, claim victory, and eventually move on to their next target with increased political capital. Is that likely? Of course not. But can you give me a more plausible scenario of recapture getting fixed in the next decade?
  2. It’s nice when people show you that it’s pointless before you waste a bunch of keystrokes.
  3. Let’s say you are low income and get awarded the 10k voucher for your child. Where are you going to go with that? St Andrews costs 23k per year so you have to come up with 13k, which you don’t have. The voucher is worthless to you. Now let’s say you are upper middle class and get the same 10k voucher. You have been opting for public school because 23k is a big expense. Now your costs are 13k and that’s more manageable. Only about 1k per month so you go. That low income kid from the first scenario is actually worse off now because the funding for your upper middle class kid is pulled from the system. There is an economy of scale to this and each kid that leaves hurts the ones left behind. Which brings us back to my original comment about all of this being a feature not a bug.
  4. That’s definitely the goal. Some states have conjured up voucher systems that (unsuccessfully) prioritize those kids. Pretty telling that ours is the opposite.
  5. The post I quoted said “during school hours” not “the locker room” and it was referring to all teachers, not just coaches.
  6. Imagine telling degreed professionals when they can or can’t look at their phones. There’s already a massive shortage due to lack of pay and lack of respect.
  7. McCallum should be fine through all of this. It’s been the most underrated HS in the district for years and always cracks me up when certain uppity demographics turn their nose up at it.
  8. Long Island prosecutors have used DNA to arrest a suspect of a murder that happed there in the 80s. I’m bringing it up here because three other people had previously been convicted of this murder. They were eventually exonerated after having their names drug through the mud and years of their lives wasted. New use of DNA seems to be shedding some light on how bad prosecutors and detectives were at actually convicting the right people. The problem is we are only going back and using it on cases where the original conviction was overturned so it is still technically unsolved. How many thousands are wrongly sitting in jail and nobody is looking at the case because it’s “solved”.
  9. I’m here for it!
  10. Ok, who is going to watch this and report back? I have to sit though a lot of school board meetings to give a 5 min presentation and refuse to do it off the clock 😀
  11. I’m sure that Boswell did cut a deal for Pemberton parents to stay there. It’s very on brand for her and has nothing to do with my point. And yes, I know the BW and Casis parents are very connected, they basically share a neighborhood. But I stand by my statement about most BW parents wanting to be a part of a smaller, more relaxed school than Casis. I have had dozens, if not hundreds of direct conversations with BW families about this exact topic when I was an AISD employee very close to this situation. Not going to say anymore about BW on here because I’ll dox myself and don’t really have any interest in doing so.
  12. It’s more of a cultural thing. BW parents tend to like a smaller, laid back school without the hyper intense parent culture. I think they would get more pushback if Casis was the plan.
  13. I understand the portable games are frustrating and there is a potential bait and switch on the bond. None of that is fair to BW. Especially to former Pease parents that have stuck with the district. The thing that it doesn’t change is that BW is a small school serving 200 neighborhood kids at an inefficient per student cost AND the building needs 6.2 million in work. Even if you do the work, it doesn’t have the size to absorb students from other schools. I don’t know what type of work Matthews needs, but I know it can absorb BW kids while the reverse isn’t true. The district has to move to larger, financially efficient schools. It’s the complete opposite of what I believe in as an educator. Small, high quality neighborhood schools with tailored offerings are the best of public education. I always chose to work at schools like that. The state turbo fucked that reality for AISD.
  14. All of that is the opposite of the goal.
  15. The real issue is recapture and everything else is rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.
  16. It won’t tell the whole story, but I assume they will eventually have to vote on this closure plan. Will be interesting to see how the votes stack up. The people I know that are still with the district are concerned the board will try to keep too many schools open and continue the financial decline.
  17. Another general comment related to what I said about efficiency above. Note that it’s a lot of smaller elementaries on the list. Ridgetop, maplewood, sunset valley, Bryker woods…..all at about 450 or lower.
  18. I’ll try to say what I can without doxing myself. I know the building well and what it would take to get it up to a functional standard. We are talking many millions of dollars that the district doesn’t have. Hell, even some of the portables they aren’t counting are falling apart. When you look at schools with an enrollment of 350 or less, the overhead costs are insane. You are still paying a principal, AP, counselor, librarian, nurse, registrar, admin assistant, etc but not spreading the costs across 700+ students. The size causes a laundry list of other complications for the district. One very quick example: due to its small size, it has limited ability to serve special education students and any student that can’t be served in an inclusion setting has to go to another campus. The school has a lot of transfers that would likely go to another AISD school. So at the end of the day you are talking about keeping a crumbling school built in 1939 open at an extreme per student cost to serve about 200 neighborhood kids. And that number is with a lot of former Pease zoned kids, who I do feel for in this whole shit show. This district desperately needs efficiency and nothing about BW is efficient.
  19. 100%. Do it and do it all at once so that we aren’t in the same place in 5 years.
  20. Bryker Woods isn’t the sacrificial lamb their community will make it out to be. It’s a small and declining enrollment school in a dilapidated building needing millions in repairs. Very few neighborhood kids go there and it has only made it this far with transfers. The IB program is new so it’s not like people moved there with the intent of sending their kids through that program. On a cost per student basis, it has to be one of the most expensive to run in AISD.
  21. Nm, just saw the other thread on AISD.
  22. The district is at about 60% of capacity. Anything other than major closures is fiscal irresponsibility. My guess is that they will actually go for it but the school board will play politics and we get about half the closures that we actually need. The can will be kicked a few years down the road and we can play this game again in 2030.
  23. My biggest takeaway from this has nothing to do with some dead guy that did it. It’s that “we” wrongly convicted people, drug their names through the mud in the national media, locked them up, and sentenced one guy to death. We collectively seem to realize how fucked the system is when information like this comes out but never stop immediately assuming guilt after the next big arrest is made.
  24. Where is all the Project Connect money going? I live in RR, but seem to remember a decent tax increase was coming for Austinites. Never get a straight answer though. Is it being set aside for adding the new lines or is it getting mixed in with current cap metro operational costs.
  25. Yes, that’s what I watched. Shocking behavior for somebody in a critical position, with so much control over the public image and livelihood of educators that had been cleared.
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