Save AISD Schools

If you were at the AISD Facility Master Plan Task Force meetings this week you might have heard people talking about a proposal that the East Austin College Prep Academy is proposing.

You can read more here.
The actual letter from the parent is here.

If you can take time to read it, I think it’s a real option that provides a win-win for the students in East Austin as well as the schools that are currently at risk of being shut down.

Please feel free to contact me if you’d like to talk.
Narissa Johnson
512-934-4445 (mobile)
NJohnson@SWKey.org
@NarissaTweets / @SouthwestKey

Only allow transfers for Minority/Majority and from over-capacity schools to under-capacity schools.
This would save money by keeping kids in their neighborhoods.

Raise taxes to the maximum allowed by law. It looks like this would be $167 per $10000 of assessed value vs $120 now. This would require voters to approve the hike.

Austin ISD pays full time employees to create various professional development opportunities for AISD teachers. These trainings are held at the Professional Development Center on Ann Richards campus. It is rare for a school district to have their own professional development center. Region XIII is a training facility that provides professional development to Austin as well as surrounding, smaller school districts. Teachers would still be able to take professional development classes, they would just have to pay for these themselves. Closing this facility would save in full time salaries for the employees who create these trainings and eliminate facility costs.

AISD could lease or sell Burger Center to save $ and funnell into academic specific programs or into facility costs at the 8 elementary schools they are proposing to close.

Start a large scale campaign in Republican districts to support tax hikes for education. Austin has no power in Austin (ironically), but we can call our relatives in suburban Houston and Dallas, as well as our friends in Will-co, and ask them to call their representatives in support of tax hikes for education.

In an extension of the idea to sell the AISD headquarters on W. 6th Street…

Many organizations today (including some very successful ones) are experimenting with being “virtual companies” — maintaining no physical office locations at all. Of course AISD will require some physical facilities and storage facilities, but a very large number of administrative employees could work full-time from their homes or other remote locations with very little overhead other than their AISD-issued computers and a stipend to help pay for their phone and internet service.

Mayor Leffingwell supports keeping schools open, so we may convince the city to allow the AISD to hold its Board meetings in the City Council chambers, a well-suited space for these types of meetings.

This idea might sound a little crazy to some people, but compared to the idea closing multiple exemplary schools, hopefully it won’t sound quite as outlandish to most.

Another benefit of this plan could be that it’d put AISD in the national spotlight as bold, innovative, daring, etc. — anyone know of a school district of comparable (or any?) size that’s done this?

This idea was proposed by several speakers and clearly had wide popular support at the Jan. 13 community meeting. How much could be raised?

Buses, walls, signs… it might not be so pretty, but it’s worth it if it raises the money to keep schools open.

(I’m not taking credit for this idea; one of the excellent speakers at the Jan. 14 meeting brought this up.)

Boundary adjustments can and should be made in the short and long term to address overcrowding, to more equitably distribute student populations, to maximize utilization of every seat in the district and to limit future bond packages and public financing to build costly new schools.  Austin’s current boundaries inequitably track students in higher income neighborhoods to higher income schools, similar to gerrymandered political districts.  For example, bringing students in Southwest Austin more than 10 miles away to attend Austin High School.  It is fundamentally unfair that if you live West of S. Lamar you track to a better school for middle and high school than if you live East of Lamar.  Furthermore, it is hard to identify a non-discriminatory motive for not putting any of the students currently zoned to Akins into Bowie when Bowie has greater capacity and less enrollment than Crockett.  Akins kids should be rezoned to BOTH Bowie and Crockett.  The District’s failure to do that reflects political appeasement of the upper class over the benefit of the larger population of Austin ISD students.  If schools are consolidated, consolidated schools should track to the new feeder patterns, hopefully leading to greater equity and less gerrymandering in Austin’s schools. The current patterns only reinforce the disadvantages the large majority of AISD’s population faces.  All Austin schools should better reflect the economic diversity of the city’s population and together we can bring ALL Austin schools up.