No doubt. We're in the Murchison/Anderson zone, but the kids are in the fine arts academy at Lamar, and both want to go to McCallum. It drives me nuts that AISD refuses to officially call the FAA a magnet program (even though that's exactly what it is in every respect), so they don't have to provide buses for the kids. Dropoff and pickup is like an elementary school on crazy pills. I understand it's a budgeting issue, but that brings us back around to how insane it is that we paid (checks notes) around $10kin property taxes for AISD last year, and we have rats and raccoons running around classrooms with kids in them while suburban kids get palaces that we pay for. We can't even get our kids a ride to school. The way the State of Texas treats Austin residents is how violent revolutions have been started in the past. We have no representation whatsoever, and the clown show is happy to keep robbing us blind and just handing it over to suburbs (or the general fund) because they're mostly white, evangelical, and vote for the current state leadership. It's insane and something you'd expect in a banana republic, not the United States.
McCallum is getting a renovation over the next few years, finally. My kids will be going there during the construction, which I don't love but they're damn near insistent upon it. AISD seems happy to let Lamar continue to be a rat-infested dump. At least the programs have been good, and we'd still rather our kids attend a dump where they don't ban books, worry about drag queens instead of ministers, or teach religion as a counterpoint to science like in the burbs. But it still sucks that this state is so hostile to the citizens of Austin, who are bankrolling the rest of the state in more ways than one. Is there a historical precedent for a city seceding from a state? That would be interesting.