Spring Branch ISD going down the tubes

[Reefmonkey]

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:

• Quote

   

  • Combine schools/change boundaries
  • Change staffing models, including class sizes
  • Eliminate 10-20% of SBISD staff
  • Remove the 20% local optional homestead exemption
  • Discontinue the block schedule model for Stratford High School
  • Reduce programming and/or institute pay-to-play models for athletics, performing and visual arts
  • Discontinue choice and specialized programs
  • Cut safety and security, counseling and mental health services
  • Cut centralized instructional supports, including but not limited to, interventions, Dyslexia services, and college and career counseling
  • Cut business and operations functions that support the district’s safety, security and fiscal management
  • Raise the tax rate

   

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.

Edited May 8, 2023 by Reefmonkey

[Ross]

The need for additional state funding applies to all districts. Bettencourt and Huffman would be happy to eliminate public schools completely, just like their mentor Dan "Despicable Human Being" Patrick. 

I do hope that the lawsuit to force single member districts for SBISD succeeds, and the obnoxious jerks from South of I-10 lose control. They are only interested in keeping Memorial and Stratford as good schools, and could not care less about the schools North of I-10.

[Reefmonkey]

2 hours ago, Ross said:

The need for additional state funding applies to all districts. Bettencourt and Huffman would be happy to eliminate public schools completely, just like their mentor Dan "Despicable Human Being" Patrick. 

I do hope that the lawsuit to force single member districts for SBISD succeeds, and the obnoxious jerks from South of I-10 lose control. They are only interested in keeping Memorial and Stratford as good schools, and could not care less about the schools North of I-10.

Oh, you're 100% right, and that's the pathetic irony. The conservative SBISD board members, Chris Earnest, Lisa Alpe, Caroline Bennett, and John Perez are all true believers, they believe in public education....they just want that public education to conform to their conservative Christian values. When they were running for office and had people like Bettencourt, Huffman, and Mano DeAyala patting them on the back and cheering them on, saying "you fight that fight against CRT and gender identity," they didn't realize these seasoned politicians were playing them as useful idiots in their long game to tank public education. And it starts with using hysteria over moral panics like CRT and gender identity to push for "school choice." “School choice” and voucher programs have always been a Trojan horse extremists have been constructing with the intent to siphon funding from public education to force it to collapse. Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo, the architect of the strategy of elevating critical race theory from an obscure graduate-level academic theory into a major conservative talking point, said in 2022 “To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.” The strategy has always been to sow distrust of public schools by manufacturing outrage over lies about schools “failing” and “indoctrinating” students. Once enough people bought this Big Lie to be amenable to voucher programs, the decreased funding would make the “failing” part a self-fulfilling prophesy. Once public schools were truly failing anyone who could afford to put their children in private schools or homeschooling would have no choice but to do so, and public education would diminish in significance in American society. 

Earnest, Alpe, Bennett, and Perez are all shellshocked. Perez especially, this guy thinks he's the smartest guy in any room, and in every board meeting, just about every third sentence he's reminding everyone that he's an engineer, he thought these guys in Austin were his friends, he kept telling everyone "just wait, you'll see, Mano [DeAyala] is gonna come through for us," like Little Orphan Annie telling the other kids in the orphanage that her parents were coming back for her.

And you're absolutely right, they don't care about north of I-10, which makes it that much more disgusting when they shamelessly talk about how Austin doesn't understand how unique Spring Branch is, that we're only one of two Recapture districts that's majority low income students. I'm cheering on that lawsuit, but mostly I'm just hoping their buffoonery doesn't tank property values in the next two years, so we can cash out when our youngest graduates and move back into town.

Edited May 9, 2023 by Reefmonkey

[Blue Dogs]

On 5/8/2023 at 5:54 PM, Ross said:

The need for additional state funding applies to all districts. Bettencourt and Huffman would be happy to eliminate public schools completely, just like their mentor Dan "Despicable Human Being" Patrick. 

I do hope that the lawsuit to force single member districts for SBISD succeeds, and the obnoxious jerks from South of I-10 lose control. They are only interested in keeping Memorial and Stratford as good schools, and could not care less about the schools North of I-10.

Big question is whether the TX Education Agency takes over this school district as well ?

A.) YES

B.) NO

C.) TBD

 

[Reefmonkey]

Well the last few board meetings have provided some good entertainment. The blood feud that has developed between SBISD board member John Perez and Texas House District 133 representative Mano Deeyala has all the high drama of a Shakespearean tragedy. Or at least the beef between Nicki Minaj and Cardi B.

Perez thought because Deyala cheered him on in all his efforts to ban books and expunge humaneness from SBISD that his fellow Latino conservative and he had an unbreakable bond, that he had Mano's ear. When the Texas Leg was still in the process of deciding how it was going to kill public education and all the other board members were incredibly alarmed, Perez kept reassuring them that Deayala was going to come through for them in the end, like Little Orphan Annie assuring the other orphans her mother and father really were going to come for her, just you wait and see! 

But once reality settled in Johnny felt betrayed by his bestie Mano. Deayala was the only Texas lawmaker who accepted the SBISD board's invitation to come face the music over the terrible school finance result, and he got hammered, especially by Perez, who accused Deayala of making private promises to him and then crawfishing on him, and Deayala was indignant at the accusations, insisting he never made any such promises and that as a freshman rep he was powerless to sway the vote (which almost sounded like he thought that absolved him of responsibility for voting with the majority).

Two days after that meeting, Perez annouced his intention to challenge Deayala in the next primary. Perez is making this very personal. After Ken Paxton's impeachment trial ended in acquittal, Perez issued a statement praising the result and blaming Deayala for Paxton being impeached in the first place: 

"The Texas Senate's unanimous acquittal of Attorney General Ken Paxton on all 16 impeachment charges raises a critical question: how did we end up in an impeachment trial in the first place? The responsibility for this lengthy and baseless ordeal lies squarely with my opponent, Mano Deayala, who has succumbed to political pressure from the left and initiated this months-long witch hunt."

I swear, if Deayala had been against impeaching Paxton, Perez probably would have accused him of failing to hold Paxton accountable for his corruption, Perez is that invested at lashing out at Deayala.

Those of you who paid attention to the Senate's vote on the charges might have raised your eyebrows at Perez's claim the acquittal was "unanimous", since the vote went 16-14 in 9 out of 16 charges, and none of the other 5 charges were unanimous either. You also might have looked twice at Perez's claim that Deayala "initiated" the impeachment effort against Paxton, since it was the Texas House General Investigating Committee who initiated the investigation against him and recommended he be impeached, and Deayala is NOT on this committee. It's hard to know if Perez just doesn't know what "unanimous" and "initiated" means, or he simply tried to get away with making factually false claims, because Perez often awkwardly misuses big words in SBISD board meetings, but he also is frequently guilty of bombast and exaggeration as well.

[Reefmonkey]

Things have gotten even worse. At Monday’s board meeting the board discussed possible drastic measures to save money. What’s interesting is how the changes proposed so far have far and away the most dramatic impacts on the poorer, north of I-10 schools. They’re talking about closing down an entire elementary school up there, as well as a separate pre-k campus. Meanwhile south of the freeway Bendwood Elementary is an entire campus mostly devoted to a “gifted and talented” program where qualifying students are bussed in from their regular elementary schools for enrichment programs. It’s mostly a vanity program for the parents to brag about, and affluent south of the freeway kids are heavily over represented, of course. The only full time students at this campus are about 30 pre-K students with disabilities who could be moved to other campuses that offer these services. Bendwood could be closed in a heartbeat, the teachers reassigned to other schools where there are staff shortages, and not only would SBISD save money by not having to operate this campus, the proceeds from selling the property located right in Town and Country would bring in millions of dollars to the district. But no way the board wants to piss off their affluent neighbors whose kids get their enrichment time there.

And while the public comment period at the board meeting was filled with teachers, parents, and students begging the board not to close north of the freeway Treasure Forest Elementary, most of the board’s discussion time was spent arguing over making Stratford let go of its block schedule and adopt the same schedule as all the other high schools in the district. And it was John Perez, the only Stratford zoned parent on the board, arguing for keeping it against the others. It’s interesting to see how Earnest, Bennett, Alpe, and Perez were one unified bloc when they were first in the board together, railing against so-called obscene books and “CRT”, but now that they realize they were duped by political operators looking to use these fictitious scare tactics to undermine and defund public education, that common thread is gone. Now it seems like the others have lost their patience with Perez using his board seat to position his state legislature campaign and protect his kids’ schools from any of the cuts SBISD will have to make.

 

• School Closure
  • Close Treasure Forest Elementary and relocate students to Housman and Ridgecrest elementaries to maximize facility usage, staffing and programs.
• Pre-K Programming
  • Discontinue the lease for the Panda Path School for Early Learning and adjust boundaries for students to attend Lion Lane and open 1-2 Pre-K classrooms at Hollibrook Elementary.
  • Balance enrollment across the district at Pre-K Schools for Early Learning.
• Bond Programs
  • Pause the four remaining elementary school replacement projects (Sherwood, Spring Shadows, Thornwood and Terrace elementaries) to provide the district time to conduct an operations cost review.
• High School Student-Teacher Ratios
  • Increase the high school staffing ratio.
• High School Schedule
  • Align all high schools on a seven-period schedule to maximize efficiency of staffing, while also enabling a 4th teaching block at the Guthrie Center to expand CTE opportunities for students.
• Pre-K Tuition Increase
  • Increase tuition for Pre-K to $778/month ($7,002/year), maintaining the employee rate at $595/month ($5,355/year). This rate remains competitive in the area and below the Texas Education Agency maximum permitted rate

[Blue Dogs]

On 9/27/2023 at 2:06 PM, Reefmonkey said:

Well the last few board meetings have provided some good entertainment. The blood feud that has developed between SBISD board member John Perez and Texas House District 133 representative Mano Deeyala has all the high drama of a Shakespearean tragedy. Or at least the beef between Nicki Minaj and Cardi B.

Perez thought because Deyala cheered him on in all his efforts to ban books and expunge humaneness from SBISD that his fellow Latino conservative and he had an unbreakable bond, that he had Mano's ear. When the Texas Leg was still in the process of deciding how it was going to kill public education and all the other board members were incredibly alarmed, Perez kept reassuring them that Deayala was going to come through for them in the end, like Little Orphan Annie assuring the other orphans her mother and father really were going to come for her, just you wait and see! 

But once reality settled in Johnny felt betrayed by his bestie Mano. Deayala was the only Texas lawmaker who accepted the SBISD board's invitation to come face the music over the terrible school finance result, and he got hammered, especially by Perez, who accused Deayala of making private promises to him and then crawfishing on him, and Deayala was indignant at the accusations, insisting he never made any such promises and that as a freshman rep he was powerless to sway the vote (which almost sounded like he thought that absolved him of responsibility for voting with the majority).

Two days after that meeting, Perez annouced his intention to challenge Deayala in the next primary. Perez is making this very personal. After Ken Paxton's impeachment trial ended in acquittal, Perez issued a statement praising the result and blaming Deayala for Paxton being impeached in the first place: 

"The Texas Senate's unanimous acquittal of Attorney General Ken Paxton on all 16 impeachment charges raises a critical question: how did we end up in an impeachment trial in the first place? The responsibility for this lengthy and baseless ordeal lies squarely with my opponent, Mano Deayala, who has succumbed to political pressure from the left and initiated this months-long witch hunt."

I swear, if Deayala had been against impeaching Paxton, Perez probably would have accused him of failing to hold Paxton accountable for his corruption, Perez is that invested at lashing out at Deayala.

Those of you who paid attention to the Senate's vote on the charges might have raised your eyebrows at Perez's claim the acquittal was "unanimous", since the vote went 16-14 in 9 out of 16 charges, and none of the other 5 charges were unanimous either. You also might have looked twice at Perez's claim that Deayala "initiated" the impeachment effort against Paxton, since it was the Texas House General Investigating Committee who initiated the investigation against him and recommended he be impeached, and Deayala is NOT on this committee. It's hard to know if Perez just doesn't know what "unanimous" and "initiated" means, or he simply tried to get away with making factually false claims, because Perez often awkwardly misuses big words in SBISD board meetings, but he also is frequently guilty of bombast and exaggeration as well.

The same scumbag Paxton, who's pretty much all but declared he's running for the United States Senate in 2026 against 4-term incumbent United States Senator John Cornyn (R-TX).

[Reefmonkey]

An interesting opinion piece from former SBISD superintendent Duncan Klussmann. Klussmann, who saw the district through the Great Recession when they had to cut more than 350 positions, accuses the current SBISD board of "grandstanding" and creating undue panic, and says that the problem lies in a board that, over the last three election cycles, has been taken over by board members who ran on single issues and narrowly focus on social and political issues while ignoring the needs of the majority of the district's students and the wants of the community.

Klussmann points out that the $35 million budget deficit the board has been harping on is only 9% of their annual budget and the district currently has an available fund balance in excess of $100 million.

SBISD has canceled block scheduling at Stratford High School and ended its gifted and talented program that bussed elementary students identified as GT to a special campus for enrichment work one day a week. Even though my daughter goes to Stratford, I don't lament the loss of the block program, but the way other Stratford parents are acting, it's like they don't understand that practically every other high school in the country operates on the schedule Stratford will have to from now on. And the GT bussing program was just a vanity program for the parents; the process used to qualify kids used an invalid test never intended for that purpose, so most of the kids weren't actually gifted, the program didn't do differentiated instruction, just enrichment work any kid could have benefitted from, and because the parents of the kids enrolled in this program raised a stink about their kids being required to make up work they missed, or missing out on fun activities the kids at their home campus did when they were at the GT day, home schools passed rules that no new information could be taught on these days, and they would be dedicated to just "review". So the GT program was a bad program that needed to be changed or eliminated anyway.

I do agree with Klussmann's disapproval of the closure of low income Treasure Forest Elementary School. Klussmann rightly points out that the board's rationale for closing the school, its declining enrollment, was also true of schools in the affluent parts of the district, but these schools were never on the chopping block. He also criticizes the district's canceling of its partnership with Yes Prep and Kipp, and suggests that students in those programs (again, in the low income part of the district) will probably leave district schools for independent Kipp/Yes Prep programs, costing the district more in per-student funding than the district spends on this partnership. Klussmann also points out the board ignored Kipp/and Yes Prep offers to renegotiate. This was also the case at a very successful early childhood pre-K program (you guessed it, in the low income part of the district), where the board ignored the partner's offer to cover the rental costs of the facility, which would have saved the district $220K a year. Klussmann obviously recognizes that so many of the deepest cuts are hitting the poorest part of the district, but he stops just short of accusing the board (all from the most affluent part of  the district) of trying to protect their and their friends' schools at the expense of the poor and mostly POC student areas.

Klussmann also chooses not to make the obvious connection between the board majority all embracing the hysteria over supposedly "obscene" or otherwise "inappropriate" books in libraries, and the board's recent decision to fire every single librarian in the district. He doesn't even mention the fact that in the same decision, the board got rid of counselor positions at all non-Title I elementary schools. I'm sure their decision had NOTHING to do with the fact that part of these counselors' job was to deliver Social-Emotional Learning programming, which conservative reactionaries like the current board conflate with Critical Race Theory. Probably the only reason Title I schools get to keep their counselors is the Title I program either directly or indirectly requires counselors at the schools, and firing counselors there would imperil those federal dollars.