BILL GRUSENDORF: SILLY SEASON IN THE INTERIM -- HERE WE GO AGAIN Ideological agendas target rural schools with a blind eye Well it’s silly season again. No, I’m not talking about the primaries, the NFL draft or baseball. I’m talking about that time in the state’s biennium when a joint select committee on funding public schools starts to meet. This Thursday, May 17th, the latest joint select committee on public school finance will begin meeting. The last time we went through this exercise two years ago the committee met numerous times all across the state, took hours of testimony, was repeatedly briefed by TEA staff, and talked, and talked and talked some more. And what came from it? Nothing. Not a thing. No report was ever issued. No recommendations ever made. The only thing the committee accomplished was to kick the can down the road on school finance (again) and forced school districts to go to court to get some positive action. In my 50+ years advocating for rural schools and public education one of the things I’ve learned that you can count on from these meetings is that folks who have an anti-public education agenda will pontificate on something they have never actually done: run a school district. Consolidation of districts is always one of their favorite topics. Each biennium I point out that consolidation does not save money. Why not? Let’s think about it. Consolidation almost always results in a school closure in a community. Those children now have to be bused to a different school almost always located much further away in another community. As a matter of fact, It’s not unusual for rural school children to be in a school bus more than two hours a day! As a result, when rural districts are consolidated student transportation costs increase. In addition, little if any overhead is saved since a superintendent in a small rural district is also often a principal, transportation coordinator (sometimes even a bus driver), cafeteria supervisor, maintenance and janitorial services foreman and yes, even a teacher for a class or two during the day. Not to mention the responsibility of observing and evaluating the teaching staff. Eliminate the superintendent and you eliminate all these other positions filled by him or her. Rural school superintendents are some of the hardest working and efficient public servants in Texas, and I would put their dedication, effectiveness and work ethic up against any politician’s. Furthermore, few of the anti-education ilk understand that small rural schools by their nature face higher costs than those incurred by their larger urban and suburban neighbors. Rural districts have to be able to pay higher salaries to some employees to entice them to move within commuting distance to the district. And when a new child moves into a small district, that district unlike larger districts, may then have to hire an additional teacher, librarian, or counselor to avoid pushing statutory or practical limits for their employees. These higher costs are recognized by the state in the Small Schools Adjustment, and that adjustment must be protected.
But the fact that rural schools are small is the only reason cynics need to complain about those schools and the state funds that help them operate. Yet many of these same people turn around and talk about the benefits of charter schools, completely ignoring the fact that the average open enrollment charter school has fewer students than the average traditional public school in Texas. In fact, according to Charter Schools in Texas: Facts and Figures published by the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB) on average, open enrollment charter schools enroll 243 students and campus charter schools enroll 389 students, compared with 568 students in traditional public schools. Rural folks know that smaller is better and obviously the state recognizes this fact by continuing to push for more charter schools. As time goes on I’m sure there will be other attacks on rural schools by those who think there is gold to be mined in small town Texas or for other reasons that might play into their agenda. We in Rural Texas will continue to work with our friends in the legislature and survive another silly season. But those who attack us have to know we won’t take such talk lightly. All we want in rural Texas is reasonable and equitable funding for our schools and to be left alone to do what we do best: educate our children.