How much does it cost to run Hays CISD? Everything it can get – and then some!
Hays reported in last week’s Free Press it had revenue in excess of its needs in the amount of $6.3 million in the general fund for the year ending 8/31/2011. According to the public notice, it now has $31.5 million in general fund savings ($51.1 million all funds), an increase of 25% in a single year! So, why is it suing us, the citizens of Texas, for more money?
The district is not promising they will do any better for our students with loads of more money even they cannot spend in a single year. Education insiders will benefit. That’s how we hire superintendents’ wives in administrative positions that are created exclusively for them. That’s how we pay over $100,000 for services of the superintendent earned prior to his employment here. That’s how we hire one new employee for every 5.8 new students. That’s how we build increasingly larger classrooms and resource draining extravagant new schools with huge life cycle costs.
Superintendents only stay around five years or so. They plan on that basis. They feather their own nest and leave. Most of the professional staff refuses to live here. The middle class are leaving. School policies do not care about middle class recruitment and retention.
Meanwhile, sustainable academic improvement is sorely lacking. Perhaps the new “Health Center” will improve academics? (Justified with “fee money”– a federal grant from money borrowed from the Chinese!) If not, at least it will attract more poor students we can all try to support. Then we will find a “need” for an even bigger facility, and so on and so on ... If the Live Oak Academy is an example, accountability is not required.
Grant or not, we can’t keep borrowing and taxing to grow “entitlements.” Current students will look back and blame us for our failure to provide them a good foundation for an improved standard of living. They will not be able to handle the debt train we are sending their way. But, who cares?
Bryce Bales
Manchaca
