Joe Holley, a columnist for The Houston Chronicle writes here about why rural Republicans in Texas vote against vouchers. The public schools in their home districts are in deep financial trouble. They can’t pay enough to attract teachers. They lack the funding for physical improvements. The public schools are the heart of their communities. Most rural districts don’t have any private schools. Those that do don’t want to lose their funding to pay for kids to go to private schools.
Holley writes:
MARATHON – One afternoon not long after Laura and I bought The Wee House, our home away from home in this small, unincorporated community west of the Pecos, I decided to go run the bleachers at the high school football field a block up the street. I didn’t know it at the time, but the long-abandoned field, dry grass giving way to patches of hard dirt and scraggly weeds, had been home in years past to arguably the most formidable six-man football dynasty in Texas history.
Between 1967 and 1976, the Mustangs compiled a record of 100-6, including a 42-game winning streak that stretched from October 1968 until November 1971. Fans from all over the trans-Pecos made the long drive to Marathon on Friday nights to watch the mighty Mustangs beat up on both six- and 11-man teams. The Mustangs were twice state champions.
It quickly became obvious that my ambitious exercise regimen was foolhardy. The spindly-looking bleachers were only eight rows high, the rows so far apart I almost had to climb from one to the next. I decided instead to investigate the rusted sheet-metal press box perched on the top row, so small that maybe three Howard Cosell-wannabes, no more, could squeeze in. I thought I might find an old program, a yellowed memento from the Mustangs’ glory days. Opening the squeaky door into the dark interior, I set off a clamorous tumult. Then came a whoosh. Powerful wings grazed the top of my head and almost sent me tumbling backward down the steps. I had disturbed a great horned owl.
Marathon’s Friday-night lights were extinguished in 2007, but as in every small Texas town I know, the school remains the heart of the community. The school is where town kids and ranch kids get to know each other. It’s where the well-off and the not-so-well-off mix and mingle; where Hispanic kids and Black kids and white kids work out their differences and discover their similarities; where members of the Parent Teacher Organization man the concession stand for basketball games in the venerable gym.
Money is a perennial problem. With a total K-12 enrollment of 53 in the school year that just ended, consolidation with nearby Alpine or Fort Stockton is always a possibility. If that happened, though — if the stately rust-colored brick high school and the low-slung elementary school across the street were left to the great horned owls — Marathon would not be Marathon.
That fact of small-town Texas life is something Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and voucher-peddling legislators either don’t understand or refuse to admit. This legislative session, while they toyed like Scrooge McDuck with a mountainous pile of cash — an unprecedented $33 billion budget surplus — they left rural school districts across the state to grapple with ever-increasing operating costs, deteriorating facilities, teacher shortages, and an unfair funding system. New requirements for security upgrades are only partially funded.
HB 100, the Legislature’s primary education bill, would have raised the state’s basic allotment, but even a modest increase — not to mention the $900 needed to match inflation — was held hostage to getting vouchers passed. The governor promises that education will be the focus of another special session later this summer, but so far, rural schools have received next to nothing. Meanwhile, administrators for schools large and small are trying to craft a budget for the coming school year without knowing what the Legislature has in store.
Instead of dipping into that enormous budget surplus to ease the hardships of small-town schools, Abbott, Patrick and friends are distracted by a different mountain of money. They covet an Everest of campaign cash from a trio of West Texas oil and fracking billionaires — people who had just as soon put public schools out of business in favor of private schools funded, at least in part, by taxpayer money.
Because Texas public schools get by on a complicated system of local tax revenue and state dollars — with state money distributed on a per-student basis — private-school vouchers are a threat to already precarious districts such as Marathon’s. If local students take their vouchers and leave, those districts would lose funds. (Some voucher plans would compensate rural districts for these lost students, but only temporarily.) Despite Abbott’s and Patrick’s assurances, one way or another, state funds could be diverted to cover private and home-schooling expenses. That would leave less per-student funding for every district, large or small.
Small-town Texans, most of whom cannot even imagine voting for a Democrat, know that vouchers are a threat. That’s why their lawmakers, even the most conservative, have fought the voucher ambitions of the GOP leadership with the ferocity of yesteryear’s Marathon Mustangs. Marathon, Alpine, Fort Davis and Marfa — the little West Texas towns I know best — need every resource the state can provide, as do their counterparts across Texas. Rural lawmakers beat back Abbott and vouchers yet again during the regular session, but the governor, like a wily old boxer, keeps probing round after round for weak spots….
Alpine is 30 miles west of Marathon. Home to Sul Ross State University, the attractive little town is much larger than Marathon, but not so big that it manages to avoid lawmaker neglect. The Legislature’s inaction during the regular session was “a dereliction of duties,” Michelle Rinehart, superintendent of Alpine ISD, told the Big Bend Sentinel.
This year, Rinehart told me a few days ago, should have been our chance to boost Texas education funding — to move the state from 42nd in per-pupil spending to something like the national average. “We were expecting at least modest pay raises for teachers,” she said.
New teachers in oil-blessed Midland start at $60,500, while her new teachers start at $33,000. But instead of helping Alpine with salaries, maintenance and other basic needs, the state’s arcane and inequitable funding formulas end up taking money away. Rinehart has to finish her budget for the next school year by July 1. Unless the Legislature changes something in the special session, the deficit will grow from $300,000 to $1 million….
Rinehart has ample reason to be frustrated. Public education spending is lower now than when Abbott took office in 2015. Given a $321.3 billion budget, our lawmakers — so far, anyway — are starving one of the basic building blocks of a self-governing nation.
Abbott doesn’t listen to educators or the people in rural districts. He listens to the billionaires who fund him.
Abbott listens to the likes of oilmen Tim Dunn and the Wilks brothers, Farris and Dan, who insist that government and education should be guided by fundamentalist Christian principles.
Dunn, a lay preacher at the Midland mega-church he and his family attend, has given more than $18 million to Abbott, Patrick, all 18 GOP state senators, now-suspended Attorney General Ken Paxton, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and assorted ultra-conservative political action committees. He also serves on the board of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a powerful voucher champion.
Farris Wilks, a native of Cisco, near Abilene, has given more than $11 million to GOP candidates and officeholders. He’s also a minister with the Cisco church his father founded, the Assembly of Yahweh 7th Day.
The superintendent of the Marathon public schools is Ivonne Durant. Holley interviewed her. She was upset that the state hasn’t increased teacher pay.
As superintendent of a rural school, Durant is constantly in touch with parents about their children’s well-being, in touch as only a small-school educator can be. They sit together at church, run into each other at the grocery store in Alpine. She teaches the Spanish class and tutors kids on Saturday morning. (One in particular: If that girl fails a class, the five-person junior high basketball team will have to disband.) Durant makes sure her seniors have definite plans — college, the military or a good job — before they graduate.
“I love my children,” she said. “They know, and their parents know, that everybody here cares. They know we’re going to be there for them.”
If only Greg Abbott and the Texas Legislature could say the same.
