At Thursday's TribLive conversation, state Sen. Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands, and state Rep. Jim Pitts, R-Waxahachie, talked about how the school finance litigation affects the debate over public education funding.
The Texas Tribune is pleased to provide the opportunity for you to share your observations about this story. We encourage lively debate on the issues of the day, but we ask that you refrain from using profanity or other offensive speech, engaging in personal attacks or name-calling, posting advertising, or wandering away from the topic at hand. To comment, you must be a registered user of the Tribune, and your user name will be displayed. Thanks for taking time to offer your thoughts.
Comments (1)
Julia W.
Sen. Williams...coming from one of those districts which, "caused this to happen", I would like to challenge you all to find a more equitable way to fund education. I'm not sure why Conservatives hate the socialist model and claim that it has never worked, but refuse to recognize Redistribution, as it applies to school funding, as socialism at its finest.
Since the passage of "Robin Hood", Andrews County has sent over $170 million to the state to be "redistributed" to other districts. Andrews citizens pay the highest property taxes allowed by the State, we have passed over $130 million in bonds to build new schools, maintain our aging facilities, purchase technology for our students and update or transportation fleet. Stealing from one area to subsidize another is not fair.
Our students travel over 150 miles to compete with schools IN OUR DISTRICT - a cost not shared by urban districts in more populated areas of the state. We used to have nice busses to get our students back and forth to compete - because of Redistribution; our fleet is aging and unsafe.
We don't have any lakes, trees, professional sports teams, entertainment venues, etc., etc., etc. to attract teachers to our area of Texas - being able to offer a higher salary than most areas used to be one of the only tools that we could employ to encourage quality teachers to come to West Texas. Because of Redistribution, we no longer have that ability.
If our children are to be exposed to a natural science museum, or history museum, we have to travel over 300 miles to get them there. Before Redistribution, our children enjoyed an occasional field trip to the Metroplex to visit such museums...we can no longer provide that opportunity to our kids.
There are school districts that join those lawsuits because they have been robbed by the Legislature's unconstitutional method of school funding and students in many of those districts have been unjustly deprived of educational opportunity. The hard-working people who live in Andrews County are tired of working 18-hour days only to have the money that rightly belongs to their LOCAL school district to educate THEIR children taken away from them and sent elsewhere. As long as the State continues to utilize an unconstitutional method to finance education, there will remain a "cottage industry" that continues to sue the State.