Education Spending Brought Home

While Texas and the rest of the United States go through the challenges of balancing the budgets, schools suffer more and more. Holly Hansen in her latest article goes in a little deeper to see what her local school district is doing with their money. Being as it may, her local school district is Leander. In this district and many other districts in Texas, teachers make up only 52% of employees. Curiously, although 13.4% of students are considered “Gifted/Talented” and only 4.9% are “Bilingual/ESL,” the Leander district employs 59 Bilingual/ESL teachers and only 36 Gifted/Talented teachers. That makes a lot of sense! No wonder Texas is so low on the totem pole when it comes to education and no one is doing anything about it. I plan as a mother of a 3yr old to put him in the best district I possibly can so that he will have the education to succeed since some districts focus on athletics than schooling. For example, Leander in 2006 passed a $286 million dollar bond and in 2007 passed a $559 million dollar bond to supposedly be used for schools and school expenses. This bond was the largest bond ever in Central Texas!!! The bond was supposed to construct numerous schools, including a new regional sports stadium with a $22.5 million dollar price tag. A second stadium, A.C. Bible, was completely demolished and rebuilt for about $12 million dollars. Leander ISD did open the new state of the art Vandergrift High School last year for $117.6 million dollars and the John Gupton Stadium. Two additional schools will be completed but will not actually open because there is not enough funding to hire the appropriate staff. Which makes you and even I wonder about how important is education over athletics? We all have to take into account that the children we are raising now are our future and it is very important for us not to leave an insurmountable amount of debt for our decisions that just put more burdens on us in the future. We all need to make it known to those who need to be notified that they have a job to do and make it happen. Our future are in their hands, so what will you do?