Category Archives: education news

education news, local news

Texas GOP goes anti-rural

Glenn Rogers writes a column for the Dallas Morning News and in his most recent submission he makes an astonishing assertion about the direction of the state’s Republican Party.

He said the party has become “anti-rural” in its outlook and its policy priorities.

He writes: Based on my personal experience and discussions with rural-focused organizations, I would say the top priorities for rural Texas are supporting public schools, providing access to quality health care, improving the quantity and quality of water resources, and improving communication capabilities.

I want to focus on the first item he lists, “supporting public schools.”

Texas public education is taking it on the chin, in the gut and maybe even in the groin by policies that strip public money from public school classrooms. The GOP-dominated Legislature recently enacted a bill that allows parents to spend public money to send their children to private schools. I consider that a direct affront on the public school system that, in my view, has served Texas families well since, oh, maybe the beginning of time.

Lawmakers tried to foist this issue onto the books in 2023, but Republican lawmakers representing rural school districts resisted. Many of them represent districts here in North Texas, where life revolves around the health and well-being of the independent public school district.

Something or someone got to those folks during the current Legislature and they climbed aboard the school voucher bandwagon to approve it and sent it to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk for his signature.

This is the kind of action that destroys rural communities. Rogers, a rancher and veterinarian in Palo Pinto County, served in the Texas House from 2021 until this year. He writes that public education is the “backbone and leading employer in rural communities.” He adds that “without their public schools, small towns … would be devastated.”

So, why do Republicans in the Legislature insist on gutting these communities? Why do they knowingly take money needed to bolster public education and allow parents to send kids to private schools?

This is a turn that a once-great political party has taken. I believe it will bite the Grand Old Party squarely in its backside.

education news, local news

Toughest job in North Texas? Yeah, probably!

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Donald McIntyre’s name possibly isn’t known much outside of Princeton, Texas, where I have lived for the past six years.

I am going out on a limb, though, with this post and declare that McIntyre might have the most challenging public service job in North Texas. He is superintendent of schools of the Princeton Independent School District.

Where is the challenge? Two words sum it up: rapid growth.

Princeton ISD is on the cusp of a growth explosion many of us have never seen. The school system keeps seeking to project what it believes will be its student population in a given academic year only to have those numbers blown apart by reality.

McIntyre — known as Mac to his friends — has to calculate those numbers and present them to the school board to enable the elected board to decide on how to respond to the growth.

A slight bit of personal history. My wife and I moved to Princeton in early 2019. We bought a home here. The population sign at the edge of town said Princeton was home as of the 2010 Census to 6,800 people. The 2020 Census figure was posted and the sign was changed to 17,027 residents. The 2020 Census figure was outdated immediately. Just recently, I heard Princeton City Manager Mike Mashburn say that, based on the number of water meters on line, the city population today stands at about 43,000 residents.

So, from 2010 to 2025, Princeton has grown sevenfold. Wow!

What’s more, most of those new families are bringing children with them. The kids have to attend school. Princeton ISD, therefore, must provide those students a place to learn.

McIntyre must ensure the kids can attend school. He is the chief administrator of a growing public school system and, believe this, he has expressed a hint of frustration at the many challenges he has to confront. The school district’s voters have stood with the district when it asks for money to build the schools it needs. The problem, though, is that the school system cannot build them quickly enough.

The elementary school built in my neighborhood in 2020 had two portable classrooms installed in the first year of its existence because the school had exceeded its capacity.

I want to doff my proverbial cap to Superintendent Don McIntyre for the examplary job he is doing just to keep pace.

education news

Public ed faces the axe

The Texas public education system is about to feel the budget axe as the Legislature prepares to approve a school voucher plan and send it to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk for his signature.

What a crock of steer manure!

House Speaker Dustin Burrows says the House has enough votes to approve a measure that would allow the state to siphon off public education money and set it aside for parents to use to pay for private education for their children.

Burrows, a Lubbock Republican, is serving his first term as House speaker. I had a glimmer of hope he might have followed the lead of two former GOP speakers — Dade Phelan and Joe Straus — in resisting this gutting of public education.

Frankly, the move to gut public school districts of money runs totally counter to traditional Republican support in rural areas of the state. Many communities represented in Austin by GOP lawmakers, depend on healthy and vibrant public school systems to hold their towns together.

Those systems will be deprived of funds they need from taxpayers’ pockets once this goofy idea becomes law.

Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and many MAGA Republican lawmakers are dead set on depriving public schools of the money they need to strengthen themselves and provide quality education to our public school children.

My wife and I brought two sons into this world and they attended Texas public schools until the early 1990s. I believe they both received good educations that enabled them to attend and graduate from higher education institutions. They both have flourished in their professional lives as a result.

I only can hope that future generations of Texas kids can enjoy the fruits of a solid public education. I don’t feel good about where the state is going.

education news

Why damage public ed?

For the ever-lovin’ life of me I cannot fathom why Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and most of the Texas Republican legislative caucus want to tear the guts out of our state’s public education system.

They want to siphon taxpayer money that pays for public schools and direct it to private schools throughout the state. Why the warfare against the state’s public education system? They contend the public schools are doing a lousy job of educating our children; they say the schools aren’t safe places for our kids to learn.

The solution, though, should not be to yank money out of the system. They want to use public money for vouchers parents can use to enroll their kids in private schools.

Abbott and Patrick say they have enough votes in the Legislature to approve the robbery scheme that Abbott hatched two sessions ago. He ran into resistance from, get this, rural Republican legislators who said weakening public education would damage their communities, where lives revolve around public school activities.

Former Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan agreed with his GOP colleagues and let the measure die in the 2023 Legisalture. He got punished for letting the “will of the House” dictate the fate of the proposal. GOP operatives sought to launch a primary campaign against Phelan in 2024 … but he pulled out of the speaker’s race.

I agree that public education has issues to resolve, but dammit, taking money out of the system doesn’t provide a cure! It only worsens the conditions that our state’s leaders say they want to repair.

It makes no sense to me.

education news

Vouchers coming: get ready

Oh, how I wish Texas Republican legislators can do what they did a legislative session ago and kill a plan to gut the state’s public education system in favor of sending tax money to pay for private education.

It doesn’nt appear it will happen. During the 2023 Legislature, rural Texas lawmakers, including some in North Texas, railed against the idea of siphoning off public money to pay for private school vouchers. They said public schools are the heartbeat of their communities and they should be strengthened with more funding, not have it taken away.

The Texas House managed to kill the legislation. To their credit, the GOP legisltive caucus stood firm against Gov. Greg Abbot’s effort to gut the public education system.

I am a big believer in public education. I agree it’s damaged, but depriving it of valuable resources that can be spent to improve it is not the way to go.

I just wish the rural Texas GOP lawmakers can make the case once more that the state must not do irreperable damage to communities that rely on public education to hold cities and towns togeteher.

education news

Abbott to renew fight against public education

Gov. Greg Abbott is sharpening his long knives in the upcoming legislative fight against public education.

I will watch with intense interest at how his fellow Republicans, elected to their rural legislative districts, deal with the governor’s efforts to gut and dismember the institutions that long ago became the heart and soul of these lawmakers’ communities.

GOP lawmakers resisted the idea of peeling public money away from public schools and sending them to private schools. The effort failed in the 2023 Texas Legislature. The successful blockage cost House Speaker Dade Phelan his chance of returning as speaker.

I learned long ago, when I first moved to Texas in 1984, that rural districts breathe life into communities that otherwise might wither and die were it not for the strength of their independent school districts. Many of those districts produce dedicated legislators who vow to fight for them in the halls of power in Austin; and most of those legislators these days are Republicans.

Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick want to mess with that political chemistry by vowing to siphon money for public schools and allow parents to redeem vouchers they can use to pay for their children’s private education.

Well, I can say without equivocation that from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods and from Texoma to the Valley that rural communities that depend on the strength of their public school systems are going to fight for their very lives.

Will it matter in the end? Probably — and tragically — not … as long as the Republicans in the Legislature remain wedded to the MAGA view that public education is not worth saving.

Baloney …

education news

Take all the phones away!

All the recent news reporting about local school districts “cracking down” on cell phones in public schools has me nearly laughing out loud.

Call me a hardline, no-nonsense conservative fanatic on this issue … but I have believed since the advent of cell phones that those devices have no place in a public school classroom. Zero. None.

I long have been advocate for school districts confiscating cell phones from students when they enter the school building at the beginning of a school day. Take ’em away, lock ’em up in a secure place and tell the kids they can collect the devices when the final bell rings at the end of the day.

Several school districts in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area have been reported to be cracking down on the devices.

I wrote a column about this matter while working for the Amarillo Globe-News. The blowback I received from angry parents was a thing to behold. I didn’t get a lot of negative response, but much of what I received was nonsensical on its face.

One parent actually told me that her child needed to be available for instant communication and that depriving the student of a phone would put him or her in jeopardy. I reminded her of how parents used to get in touch with kids during a school day: They call the school, ask to speak to their little darlin’, the school secretary sent someone to the classroom and the student arrived at the office to take the call.

How long does that take? Five minutes?

Teachers have a difficult enough job as it is without having to cope with students sending text messages back and forth during lesson time. Students should be required to devote their undivided attention to the teacher. Yeah, I understand that such a requirement was impossible to achieve even prior to the advent of cell phones.

I am heartened to hear that districts report a decline in cyber bullying after the cell phone crackdown. How can that possibly be a bad thing?

education news

Get ready to rumble!

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Carlos Cuellar sought to issue a word of caution to his fellow Princeton school board  trustees prior to their vote on a resolution aimed at federal education policies.

They should be prepared to fight a long battle in the courtroom, he said. Not to be deterred, the board voted unanimously to send a resolution denouncing Biden administration policies on Title IX, the 50-plus-year-old law that sought to prevent discrimination against female student-athletes.

The battle has morphed into something quite different these days and Princeton has joined the fight against what it believes is an effort to allow males to compete with females and for males to use female restrooms.

I am going to keep my opinions on this matter to myself, as I cover it for the Princeton Herald. I am willing, though, to echo Cuellar’s observation about what lies ahead for the school system.

There will be lots of litigation. I mean to say it might not end in the foreseeable future.

Trustee Duane Kelly said he is prepared to fight. So are the rest of the board. I cannot speak for the community as a whole, because I do not know Princeton well enough yet, given that I’ve lived here a mere five years.

This is a new era in public education, to be sure. Title IX was enacted to prevent educational institutions from discriminating against women. It sought to provide equal opportunities for women to compete athletically and in other extracurricular activities.

Now we’re talking about allowing transgendered students to compete alongside people of their chosen gender, rather than against those who are of the same gender at the time of their birth.

Complicated? Yeah … do ya think?

education news, local news

GOP needs psychiatric help

Two pieces of campaign literature ended up in my mailbox this weekend that sent out a loud and clear message.

The Texas Republican Party is suffering from a form of schizophrenia I never have seen …. at least not to this degree. The examples showed up in competing flyers for two Republicans vying for a seat on the Texas State Board of Education.

Follow me for a moment on this, because it’s a beaut.

Pam Little is running against Jamie Kohlmann in the May 28 GOP runoff for SBOE’s District 12 seat. Little is the incumbent. She finished first in the primary but didn’t gather enough votes to win the GOP primary outright., Hence, the two of them are running off for the nomination.

Little has garnered the endorsement of GOP U.S. Rep. Keith Self, a loud-and-proud MAGA Republican who also has endorsed the election of POTUS No. 45 this fall.

What does Self say about Little? She’s a “strong conservative” who has taken a “bold stance against radical ideologies and focused on positive outcomes for students.” Little helped bring back “cursive writing,” she fought and won “to keep the woke agenda out of our social studies standards. Kohlmann, according to Self, has endorsed a “liberal Democrat” for the Dallas ISD school board and gave him money to assist him in his effort to be elected.

Let’s turn to Kohlmann’s ad. She accuses Little of “voting for radical DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) policies” on the SBOE. Kohlmann accuses Little of contributing to “our kids … being brainwashed by woke liberal ideology.”

Sheesh, man!

I am baffled, bamboozled and befuddled. I know Rep. Self a little bit. I know him to be a staunch conservative. He’s a retired Army officer, a West Point graduate and a combat veteran. He speaks forcefully and with a full-throated ferocity in favor of the agenda pitched by POTUS 45. I am left to ask: Is this the kind of fellow who would endorse a thinly veiled “liberal Democrat?” I think not.

All of this simply demonstrates to me that the Texas Republican Party is as aimless, feckless and lacking in ideas as the national GOP.

education news, local news

‘Kids today’ are doing well

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A standing assignment I have while writing freelance articles for a group of weekly newspapers in Collin County, Texas, exposes me to the realization that we are leaving this world in fine hands.

In recent years I have been writing feature articles on the two top scholars graduating from Farmersville High School. We call them the “vals and sals.” The valedictorian and salutatorian in high school classes generally get extra attention from local media everywhere; it’s no different in the communities served by the husband-wife team that owns these papers.

I haven’t yet met the top two academic finishers from the FHS Class of 2024. I am hoping to arrange this week for a time to meet the two young women who will tell me a bit of their story.

What I want to share with this brief message is the joy I get talking to these young people. Every time, in every community where I have had the pleasure of working, I come away from these meetings feeling good about our future. These young people are impressive in many important ways.

They have clear goals for themselves. They are focused on succeeding. They strive for excellence. What’s more, the diversity of their upbringing tells me that whether they come from broken homes or from families with mothers and fathers who remain devoted to each other, the young scholars will not be deterred from achieving meeting the goals they have set for themselves.

All of this proves to me that when someone rolls their eyes and lament something about “kids today” that they should rest assured that the generation that will inherit the world we are leaving behind will do better than “just fine.”

Let us not forget, too, that elders’ concern about their world’s future goes back to the beginning of civilization.