Over 600 school districts have signed on the mantra “Make Education a Priority”. At what cost? That question they leave unanswered. Growth in government has never resulted in sustainable improvement in our economic well being and there is absolutely no correlation between spending and student performance. If that were the case, Hays would have the highest test scores in Texas! We’re hiring one new employee for every 6.96 students. We have one teacher for every 14.5 students. We have absolutely no economies of scale.
Have SAT scores reversed their annual decline? Has the number of students achieving superior performance increased? Has the dropout rate been fixed? Are our schools attracting a diverse socio-economic mix of students?
Only 36% of our highest paid staff in the bloated Central Office lives in the district. It is not any better for bloated campus administration. Only 52% of our entire professional staff is invested in the district. All the rest commute over here. Why not? We provide free tuition for their kids at the school of their choice and we provide subsidized day care taking up valuable classroom space.
We’re spending our grandkids money with these extravagant buildings financing them for 30 years with interest only payments for the first 22!
In 2008, we were told by Kirk London: “I feel strongly that we’re going to continue to grow 900-1000 students a year and we have to look at inflation and the cost of portable buildings”. Well, construction costs declined 25% since this statement but Hays CISD spent it all anyway and we did not have a penny left over. We grew by 663 this year but we still opened two new 800 student elementary schools for a net increase of just 276 elementary students! The London’s have retired and left leaving us holding the bag.
The vast majority of our teachers are caring and are working very hard. But over half have less than 5 years’ experience-thanks to our districts buy out of experienced teacher contracts. Experience counts. We’ve never recovered from this loss of experienced mentor teachers.
Bryce Bales
Manchaca
