For the last 15 years, the city government and the Clear Creek ISD school board have been fighting with the city residents to build a high school on land that is already owned by the school district. Indeed, the city’s residents are so opposed to building a new high school that each time it’s voted upon, the vote against is almost 90%. We’ve built over a dozen elementary schools in the last 15 years, two or three junior high schools, and absolutely zero high schools. However, the three high schools that are currently used to house the area’s 50-some-odd-thousand high school students are literally overflowing. Three of the local junior high schools that were adjacent to each of the three high schools were turned into Ninth Grade centers for freshman, while three new Junior high schools were built somewhere else.
Right now, they’re bulldozing half of the high school I attended–Clear Creek High School. It’s every student’s dream to see them bulldoze your school, but school starts in a few weeks and I know they won’t have even laid the foundation for the new building before classes start. So the school board has held another vote to build the new high school. And yet again, the decision has been practically vetoed by the entire community, meaning that the local high school (which is so old that it still has asbestos in the original classrooms and the administration building) will remain unfinished for probably another two years, and students will be housed in the 100 temporary buildings that have been set up next to the fields and the Aggie Barn (the Future Farmers of America is HUGE in this area). But who cares? The district just rebuilt and refurbished the football and practice fields! Our students may not learn how to read, but at least they’ll have a great field on which to play sports!
Does Texas really hate educating it’s students? In my opinion, yes. Coming from the Texas Public School System myself, I have to say that no state hates learning more than Texas. Alabama, Mississippi, and Kansas may hate teaching certain things, but Texas hates teachers, education, and students so much that it has done everything it can to refuse to pay for education or to make it available to its children. (Did I mention that Harris County ISD has been closing schools because they’re “not profitable”? When was education ever supposed to be monitarily profitable?) Ah yes, Texas loves sports, and school is a great excuse to get kids to play for free, but God help you if you want to learn something.
I just don’t damn get it! An educated populace is important to making sure that the political system is run fairly and democratically. An uneducated populace makes way for the kind of religious extremism and ignorance that is so rampant in the South, and in certain other places in the world (such as the Middle East, where some kids are taught from an early age that America is Satan and Allah wants you to blow it up). Besides that, there are only so many available positions at McDonald’s and What-a-burger for an illiterate quarter-back who can barely spell his own name.
They’re NIMBYs and they are they same kind of people who complain about early-release programs for convicts yet refuse to build more prisons.
What they don’t want is to pay for those schools to be built, and that’s a shame. They don’t want quality education for their kids (because you know, taxes), yet again complain that their precious genuis can’t get into a quality college.
Basically, Texas has said, “Well, we got one student into the White House. We’re done.”
I feel your pain, as another product of the Texas educational system and daughter of a parent who works for it. There’s so much red tape and politics and teacher griping (and worst of all, indifference or lack of support from parents) that it’s nearly impossible for anyone to pass some seriously-needed reforms. My region of TX doesn’t sound nearly as bad a Clear Creek’s situation, but it’s pretty sad when the Texas educational system is so base that a transfer student from California has enough credits by their sophomore year to graduate 2 or 3 times over in a school down here. o.O;
I am so, so sad. :’(