School Closure Remains an Agenda Item In Fort Bend ISD

As reported at the KTRK website, the Fort Bend ISD board of trustees will hold yet another workshop on redistricting this evening. One of the agenda items, according to the notice is to consider the closing of a middle school and a high school, both of which are currently under-enrolled. Not mentioned in that article, but certainly on the minds of the parents of hundreds of Colony Bend Elementary School students is the possibility of closing that school. That possibility has alternately risen and then dropped below the radar.

The possibility of this closure is now found only here.

But I have to say that based on what we are seeing coming out of the State Comptroller’s office, the likelihood of an elementary school closure seems more and more probable.

Susan Combs, who in the past made herself felt in Texas schools as the State Agricultural Commissioner when she issued edicts that forever changed the rules on access to “junk food” in public schools, is at it again, once again making her presence known in Texas public schools.

Susan Combs wants to trim $558 million from the state’s education budget simply by increasing the statutory class size limit from 22 in the state’s Kindergarten through 4^th grade classes. In doing so, this would require the services of 12,000 fewer specialists in early childhood pedagogy, also known as elementary school teachers.

So Fort Bend ISD, in considering an elementary school closure, and consolidation of classes in a redistribution of Colony Bend students, appears to be ahead of the curve.

Ahead of a curve that, arguably, decreases student performance, only because student performance increased when the lower class size limit was instituted all those years ago.

So should Fort Bend ISD parents be concerned? Undoubtedly. What can they do about it? How about step up? Now that we have a super-majority Republican presence in the state house, including a bunch of something for nothing Teabaggers, Fort Bend parents, if they want to maintain the current quality of education that their children currently enjoy, need to step up as the Republican majority in the House, and the Republican-dominated executive branch, including the TEA and the Comptroller’s office find a way to step back.

Step up or accept mediocrity.