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Posted
1 minute ago, DalTxHornFan said:

Rip the band aid off.  This is no fun, but it is ridic that the administration and schoolboard have not more aggressively dealt with this. 

Enrollment is way down.  Facilities have not followed.  Right size. 

100%. Do it and do it all at once so that we aren’t in the same place in 5 years.

Posted (edited)
17 minutes ago, Larry T. Spider said:

100%. Do it and do it all at once so that we aren’t in the same place in 5 years.

And I am not endorsing the nuances of the redistricting changes.  Details. 

What is obvious in the big picture is that the AISD needs less desks and less square footage.

And the administration and school board have not had the political will to deal with that reality.

Edited by DalTxHornFan
Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, Larry T. Spider said:

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.

As somebody who lives not far away, who had a kid there for a few years, and who has been to events there and has a bunch of neighbors who go there, enrollment has been up the past few years, and if you've ever had the misfortune of driving by in the mornings, you'd know a shitload of neighborhood kids walk and bike there, and that many parents live in the area because it's a neighborhood school.

AISD deliberately chose to take portables out of the equation for enrollment to make Bryker Woods and other schools look over-enrolled.

And that area pays a helluva lot more in taxes than other parts of AISD, and AISD could lose a shitload of those kids to private schools rather than parents being fine with them being bused to Brentwood or Mathews downtown.

Edited by atomheartbevo
Posted (edited)

The actions over the past few months all make a lot of sense if you think of the administration deciding the state is going to take over next year, and they are trying to close schools and sell off property to developers - it's not a mistake that some very desirable pieces of real-estate were a part of this.

Those who were predicting that this was a last-ditch effort to reward some of the developers who helped get some people elected are probably much closer to the truth than they realize, from some comments made by some officials. Once the state fully takes over, the current folks running the district won't be able to easily get rid of desirable properties.

And the state is absolutely going to drive a shitload of people to move their kids to private schools or to a neighboring district, not to mention driving teachers to other districts.  We are in the last days of AISD being relevant. Enjoy the next year or two.

Edited by atomheartbevo
  • Rage+1 1
Posted
1 minute ago, Snake Diggity said:

We got rezoned to a lesser rated middle school which is 3 times further away than the middle school we were previously zoned to.  Cool.  And fuck my life.

All by design.

Posted
5 hours ago, BrazilHorn said:

Also I don’t think Boswell does jack shit for our area (just my opinion from interactions with her over years). 

5 hours ago, Cap33 said:

Agree. She's more interested in virtue signaling than taking care of the people she said she would represent.

I got stuck at a birthday party for one of my kids' friends tonight, and there were parents from multiple schools represented by Boswell, including those affected (well I guess almost everybody is affected), and from what they were saying, she told parents from multiple schools a lot of stuff over the past few months that turned out to be false (my few interactions with her over the past year were not impressive at all, just another politician who tries to tell you what she thinks you want to hear and pretends to give a shit about your community).

As one parent put it "she's either the dumbest fucking person to sit on the board and represent a district or she was straight up playing the parents of multiple schools."

From what was said, she's got parents from multiple schools who plan on making sure she's never elected to an office again - any offices she tries for, the bat signal will go out and thousands of people will get emails about her actions over the past few months.

Posted
1 hour ago, DalTxHornFan said:

Rip the band aid off.  This is no fun, but it is ridic that the administration and schoolboard have not more aggressively dealt with this. 

Enrollment is way down.  Facilities have not followed.  Right size. 

To be fair to the admin and there is a lot we can criticize them for I do think that facilities and other things have been highly impacted by the billions of lost revenue to recapture. Shitty podunk towns get water parks and high end football stadiums while AISD is stuck with the shit end of it.

Posted (edited)
6 minutes ago, BrazilHorn said:

To be fair to the admin and there is a lot we can criticize them for I do think that facilities and other things have been highly impacted by the billions of lost revenue to recapture. Shitty podunk towns get water parks and high end football stadiums while AISD is stuck with the shit end of it.

Recapture sucks and is absolutely a massive part of the problem for AISD, and the state has been fucking with budgets to help setup the largest districts to have problems/be ripe for takeover.

But the district leadership has known for a long time that the state could take over if they didn't improve things, and they saw what happened in Houston, and they were unwilling over the past few years to really do what needed to be done. After the first F a school got (and even really before - they knew where the problems were), the district should have busted ass to fix it, rather than waiting for them to accumulate more and then doing something drastic (or not enough).  

Offering high-performance teachers a bounty to switch to a lower-performing school was never going to work when the threat of closing the school was still looming over those teachers. The notion of "leave your job at the stable school where you are high-performing for a little more money at a low-performing school, and if we close that school, you can reapply to the district and maybe get a similar position back" was never going to work.

Edit: Sorry for ranting, the birthday party I was at was nothing but an airing of grievances, and today's news confirmed what I had heard a few weeks back from a parent at Austin High (about which schools would be on the final list, with the exception of some minor changes on zoning). I'm just fucking sick that my kids are not even through middle school yet and we are going to face a state takeover.

Edited by atomheartbevo
Posted
3 minutes ago, BrazilHorn said:

To be fair to the admin and there is a lot we can criticize them for I do think that facilities and other things have been highly impacted by the billions of lost revenue to recapture. Shitty podunk towns get water parks and high end football stadiums while AISD is stuck with the shit end of it.

No disagreement.  But I still think that they have not had the political will to deal with the icebergs ahead of them.  None of this should be a surprise.  Probably going on at least 10 years or more.

Posted

I am an AISD and UT product.  (Anderson Trojan hollah!) But we decided to home school and private school our kids. 

We paid the taxes, but didn't partake in their offerings.  I very much hope that AISD can get it together.

Posted
15 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

As somebody who lives not far away, who had a kid there for a few years, and who has been to events there and has a bunch of neighbors who go there, enrollment has been up the past few years, and if you've ever had the misfortune of driving by in the mornings, you'd know a shitload of neighborhood kids walk and bike there, and that many parents live in the area because it's a neighborhood school.

AISD deliberately chose to take portables out of the equation for enrollment to make Bryker Woods and other schools look over-enrolled.

And that area pays a helluva lot more in taxes than other parts of AISD, and AISD could lose a shitload of those kids to private schools rather than parents being fine with them being bused to Brentwood or Mathews downtown.

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.

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