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Found 4 results

  1. Spring Branch ISD seems to be imploding lately. In a matter of less than a month’s time they have had two high profile situations that have raised serious concerns about SBISD’s ability to remain a highly rated district. In the first situation, Superintendent Jennifer Blaine and other high ranking individuals in the district, as well as the board members, have been flooding district families' inboxes imploring them to reach out to the state legislature, warning them that if the state doesn’t raise Spring Branch’s per-student allotment by $1,000, the following consequences will occur starting the 2024-2025 school year: Senators Paul Bettencourt and Joan Huffman have called the district’s claims “scare tactics” meant to “distract parents from how the school district is managing their local, state, and federal funds like their recent hiring of Austin lobbyists.” https://embed.documentcloud.org/documents/23778251-press-release-senator-joan-huffman-and-senator-paul-bettencourts-response-to-misleading-statements-made-by-spring-branch-isd-leadership/?embed=1&responsive=1&title=1 The second situation is Spring Branch canceling all school field trips to see Main Street Theatre’s production of James and the Giant Peach. SBISD received nationwide and international negative coverage over this. This decision came very soon after a mother gave a rambling, incoherent tirade claiming the performance had characters “in drag”. This mother is a frequent flyer at SBISD board meetings’ public comment periods, always spouting fringe right wing anti-CRT, anti-trans rhetoric, and attacking one of the more moderate board members, a Methodist pastor. The district should have known her complaint wasn’t credible, but ever since the the board was taken over by a majority of super-conservative trustees that ran as anti-CRT and anti-trans candidates in 2022, there is such a culture of fear among district employees that they fold to any complaint related to the board majority’s pet issues. After all the overwhelmingly negative publicity the decision brought down on the district, the district finally issued a statement where they claimed the decision was not based on Gerland’s comments, but unnamed teachers and parents had raised concerns about “movements that could be perceived as suggestive in nature that took place during the performance.” Criticism of the district’s decision has been fierce. David DeMatthews of UT’s Department of Educational Leadership was particularly scathing in his assessment of how Superintendent Blaine handled the situation: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/shows/town-square/2023/05/01/450546/spring-branch-and-the-giant-peach-the-reaction-to-the-cancelled-field-trip-over-cross-gender-casting/ To demonstrate how obsessed the new SBISD board is about culture war issues: In the midst of this crisis over Spring Branch’s financial sustainability, the board also discussed pulling out of the Texas Association of School Boards. This itself would have financial implications for the district, because it gets significant discounts in items like insurance, legal services, etc. Leaving TASB would raise costs for the district. So why was the board considering it? Because TASB’s guidance on transgender students wasn’t conservative enough for the SBISD board, and TASB didn’t distance itself from the National School Boards Association after NSBA sent a letter to the Department of Justice asking it to investigate the increase of threats of violence against school boards. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face. I’m not sure how many people outside of Spring Branch were paying attention to what has been going on there before the James and the Giant Peach fiasco, but things are really bad there. Major crackdowns on teachers and students’ self-expression. Pretty oppressive new rules on what kind of décor teachers can have in their classrooms, what they can wear on their persons, like no rainbow pins on lanyards, etc, no pronouns in their email signatures, etc. Pulling books from libraries and teacher’s classrooms has been a big priority. The Newberry Award winning book New Kid is an example of a book that was challenged. The board passed a new policy that made it easier for parents to challenge books, and more heavily weighted parental input into the decision on whether a book is pulled or not. But then other parents started challenging all sorts of books to prove that the process was flawed, the board got furious and just started reviewing books themselves. Even books that have not been through any kind of review process have been peremptorily pulled, there are entire rooms at schools filled with pulled books. And board members have started going after vendors and threatening to cancel their contracts because they don’t like their perceived politics. They’re going after everyone from Blue Willow Bookshop, a beloved mom and pop store that has brought wonderful authors to speak at SBISD schools, just because Blue Willow’s social media is pro-inclusiveness and anti-censorship, to Scholastic, the national company that runs book fairs. There are also other reasons SBISD's political/cultural climate might not be appealing to open-minded, educated families looking for a place to move to.The Villages, the areas zoned for Memorial High School, are where the most rabid conservative trustees and their ardent supporters come from, and unsurprisingly, the climate there is incredibly racist. There is an entire section of the bleachers at Memorial home football games that yells racist and homophobic epithets at visiting school players and band members, has for years, and the administration hasn't done a thing about it. It's a school that has events like this: https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/thug-day-at-memorial-hs-called-out-for-racist-undertones/285-d076395c-f07b-4a0b-a087-aa4b28fa4eeb I see things going very badly for Spring Branch ISD over the next five years. Spring Branch is already having trouble recruiting faculty and staff. Classes like high school chemistry are running at as many as 60 kids per qualified teacher, who divides him time between two classrooms, with a student teacher pinch hitting for him in one when he’s in the other. Candidates are turning down job offers both because SBISD’s pay is not competitive and because they see the district in turmoil. When school boards go hard right on these culture war issues, teachers quit. Since Keller ISD’s board pushed to remove books about gender identity, teacher resignations went up 59%. After Granbury ISD pulled over 125 titles from library shelves, teacher resignations in that district shot up 115%. And now if SBISD staff think they might be laid off when other districts are scrambling for qualified applicants, well, I’d be looking for a job right now if I worked as SBISD. Teachers and staff will be signing their contracts for next year over the next month or so, will be interesting to see how many don’t resign with SBISD by the deadline. People pay the premium real estate prices and the premium taxes in the Memorial area for the SBISD schools. When schools can’t hire decent teachers, their performance and reputation goes downhill fast, and property values in the area follow, and it’s a self-sustaining process of decline. Now you have a district that is publicly on the brink of financial meltdown by its own characterization, you have teachers not wanting to work there because they don’t know if they’ll have a job there in a year and they can make more elsewhere, where they won’t have to fear their every word being scrutinized for “woke” leanings. Pretty soon you’ll see a mix of parents pulling their kids from public school because either they’re concerned about the declining educational performance, or because they are the kind that buy into the Moral Panic over CRT and gender identity, as well as people not wanting to move into a district with a national reputation of being small-minded, reactionary, and a local reputation of being financially unstable. That’s going to drive down the Average Daily Attendance used to determine funding, as well as drive property values down, that will only worsen SBISD’s financial woes, further drive down performance. I remember how in the 70s and 80s SBISD went from being a top-regarded district to second-rate pretty fast; teachers and administrators fled the district for growing districts in the suburbs, they had to close two high schools, Spring Branch High School and Westchester High School, and Northbrook High School went from a decent high school to the low-performing school it is now. I remember in the late 80s my parents thought about moving closer into town and considered buying a really nice house south of I-10, zoned for Memorial High School, but decided to stay in the far suburbs because they were worried they’d probably have to fork out for private school if they moved into SBISD. I see that fate repeating itself for SBISD this decade.
  2. Since we Don't have Subforums for various "Villages" or Spring Branch, so I'll be putting these here for now. In 2017 the residents of Spring Branch ISD passed a Bond Referendum. A couple of those projects will take place at Stratford High School. The current proposal calls for a demo of the existing auditorium and replace it with a new one. Other minor renovations include changes to the front entry and common areas. Developer: SBISD Architect: PBK Estimated Completion: 3Q 2021 Bond Info: https://www.springbranchisd.com/about/bond-2017/campus-bond-work/stratford-high-school This one is still going through various options. After that point, whichever option they choose will go into further refinement. SBISD Presentation (June 27th 2019): https://resources.finalsite.net/images/v1563393350/springbranchisdcom/lfxeynq4jeahqydlyc5t/2019-06-21_PAT06_FINAL_email.pdf Images from presentation:
  3. I had friends in Spring Branch who went to Spring Branch High. I remember going to the school but I can't remember where it was located. Can someone help me? Also, did they tear it down or is it still up?
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