Why Education is Poised on the Brink of Disaster and No One Cares

It’s all here at FortBendNow. Fort Bend ISD, a local school district held a workshop meeting this week in which the discussion was going to be based on redrawing school zone boundaries to meet the fluctuations in school populations.

Parents were arrayed all over the board room sporting printed T-Shirts that they had paid to put forth their own agendas.

“FBISD Don’t Divide New Territory,” read one. Yet another pleaded with the board to “Keep Sienna Together.” New residents in the Telfair community sported T-shirts that said, alternately,“Don’t Divide Telfair” and “Choose Telfair High School Number 12.” Yet another wore the shirt that asked them to“Be Fair To Chelsea Harbor.”

School boundary lines, it seems, evokes strong feelings among the parents in the community.

Board President Sonal Bhuchar, seeing the array of beshirted people decided to try and let them know what it is that they were concerned with, as opposed to what the parents seemed mightily concerned with: the budget.

From FortBendNow:

“Before we open up discussion, I want to take two minutes to explain what I think the board understands very well, but to explain to the community the framework within which we are trying to work. Rezoning is a very, very difficult situation – always stuck between a rock and a hard place. As we go into this I want to make sure all in this room know we are not drawing arbitrary lines. As a board I want to remind everybody that we are working with a very severe budget crisis.”

She went on to make the projection that state funding coming to Fort Bend ISD, according to one projection, could fall by $26 million each year. This is if education cuts face the same chopping block as other areas of the state budget.

Now this school district has been running a deficit for three years, and has recently laid off 463 teachers in order to avoid a 21 million dollar shortfall. Since the school district is already running lean, it is difficult to see where other cuts could be made. Another reduction in force is inevitable it seems.

But parents are not very concerned with that. Not as much as they are concerned with their children getting to go to the school of their choosing.

They don’t realize, it seems, that it’s not the school building that delivers the education, it is, however educators that do that job.

This is why education is doomed for a pasting in the next couple of years. Parents, that is, taxpayers haven’t yet gotten the fact that if they don’t step up and take up the slack that the state seems to be willing to extend to local districts, their schools, and the education of their children, will suffer.

Most telling is a remark by the district superintendent. The district, ironically, has funds to build more schools. They just don’t have any money to operate them (for that, read pay teachers).

And as long as parents are more concerned with what school their children attend than they are about the actual education that they receive, education faces looming disaster.

Why Fort Bend County Judge Write-In Candidate Hates Property Taxes

I keep driving by that bare-bones campaign sign posted on the public right of way along Highway 90A for Fort Bend County Judge write-in candidate Chris Meeks. This is the “Constitutional Republican” who might as well just call herself a Libertarian, having contributed to Ron Paul’s campaign, and lobbied against fluoridated water.

She has her main campaign platform posted right on the sign and it basically says that she wants to do away with property taxes in Fort Bend County.

Property taxes that pay for, you know, stuff like education in our public school system.

And despite the fact that I was pretty candid in my opinions about her and her political views, the candidate actually responded to my posting with a comment.

[Something that some of you may have realized you can’t do anymore.]

Here is an excerpt from the comment:

“Renting to the government via property taxation is slavery. Slaves are not allowed to own property. Vote for freedom and liberty. Write In Chris Meeks for Ft.Bend County Judge.”

I don’t know about you but I’m having trouble trying to relate the first two sentences to each other, or to anything else for that matter.

But what inspired me to write anew about this candidate was a conversation that I had with a local politically savvy person who is also interested in property taxes. I mentioned to her what I had read in Juanita’s blog today about how Bob Hebert is giving away nail files and she went off on Chris Meeks. She said that she had looked her up on the property tax rolls and determined that Meeks didn’t even own any property in Fort Bend County. “Why does she care about property taxes,” she asked. “She doesn’t pay any.”

I filled her in on the fact that since she is running as a write-in candidate, she is running under her maiden name, Meeks, rather than her married name, Christine Zubizarreta.

It wasn’t a half of an hour later that she reported that she located her on the property tax records. “Wow,” was all she said.

So I got curious and went to the Fort Bend County Central Appraisal District website and repeated the query.

Wow.

Chris Meeks, with her husband own a piece of property in Fort Bend County whose assessed value is over $550,000. Depending on where that is, and in what school district, that could amount to a property tax bill of over $20,000 a year.

No wonder Meeks is against property taxes.

I would be against property taxes too if I had to lay out that chunk of change to the county every year.