A RECENT GUEST COLUMN ON THE BOND RACE:


As in every other public school district in America, Ft. Bend ISD voters are being asked to vote for yet another bond to “support the children and their schools.”

Taxpayers, parents and supporters of education should not be fooled, again. There’s an agenda afoot that everyone may not realize.

Take note of the fact that public school districts went for ten or more years between bond initiatives in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Districts were able to do that because honest superintendents who spent their lives in the same district and who had loyalty to the district and its patrons, used money wisely.

But then “restructured education” came along, and all of a sudden, almost on the same day, all over America,  newspapers and TV spots were clamoring for new school buildings and other facilities. That event was not a coincidence; it was part of a national agenda to change public schools as we know them.

The newly designed “restructured” curriculum called for new “spaces.” It was a paradigm shift, don’t you know?

Actually, the concept of “reforming” education was a bunch of hooey, designed to dumb down our kids and part all of us from our hard earned cash. Think about the fact that most of us pay more in school taxes than for anything except income taxes.  How better to ruin our families than to take our hard earned dollars away from us unnecessarily!

School districts have refined the bond scheme to the point that they now recruit and hire superintendents merely because they have been successful elsewhere at floating a bond—and the bigger the bond, the better.

Ft. Bend ISD is such a school district. Your superintendent has been on the scene creating good will for a couple of years. He apparently was pretty much retired but was coaxed in to coming your way for the purpose of passing a large bond. He had recently passed a big one where he was in Virginia Beach--at least it was big for Virginia Beach.

Who benefits from such a scheme? Well, first of all the superintendent does. If he can pass a monster bond, he can write his own ticket for a bigger and better job in a public school system elsewhere (and his own board will get in a bidding war to keep him), or he can easily go into school related private enterprise like the Cy Fair and Katy ISD superintendents have done whether he has the real expertise to perform or not. And when he retires, some of the vendors, who have made all the bucks from the big bonds, building overpriced, over designed, flashy schools, will contribute handsomely to the superintendent’s retirement gift. (http://www.katyisd.org/files/community_information/Conflict%20Disclosure/Dr.%20Merrell_Retirement%20Gift.pdf)

Secondly, the vendors, which include the architects, the developers who sell their land to the school district at inflated prices, the lawyers who set it all up, the builders and all the contractors who build the monuments, all stand to benefit from the largesse of a free wheeling school board that wants to create “good will” in the community so they can get re-elected.

Do the students benefit from a big bond? Maybe, but in most cases they are the last entity to be considered in the big picture. And if one considers what all these overpriced ventures will do for students’ academic gain, please know that the answer is “nothing.” “Just for the kids” is a disingenuous slogan. A school building, no matter what it looks like, does nothing, one way or the other to enhance the academic education of students.

The process for floating a bond issue is quite orchestrated at this point. Bond committees are selected—some are more fairly chosen groups than others, but the average citizen is usually left out. And even if they are included, a process called the Delphi Technique is utilized with the aid of pre-selected facilitators who are spread through the bond meetings to make certain of the pre-conceived outcome. (Read http://www.katycitizens.org/index_files/Page6680.htm on the Delphi Technique and the following article on School Board committees.) [Now that information may be found at www.marymcgarr.com]

School boards are prone to utilize committees to arrive at decisions which they themselves were elected to make. Foisting off the responsibility of sitting in endless meetings to learn about bond matters appears to be terribly boring for them if not totally incomprehensible—thus their willingness to let others make decisions for them.

As has been clearly pointed out elsewhere, school districts and their rubber stamp school boards are more likely than not to spend hard earned tax dollars for anything BUT what they said they would when they were trying to get voters hooked on the bond.

In MY school district, Katy ISD, the district asked for bond funding for one school (James E. Williams Elementary on Peak Road) three times before they ever built it!

They’ve also asked for money for duplicate computers and telephone systems and bus barns. Somehow buildings don’t ever get built or they need just a couple of hundred thousand more to build that swimming pool, or the equipment never is what we were told it would be. Roofing systems are replaced before they should be; carpeting and air-conditioning systems, high school tracks, and Astroturfed football fields require replacement before the warranties have expired; parking lots that no one knew we needed go up overnight, and amazingly, the warranties on replacement items are never quite what they seemed when the administration was making the original pitch for the projects to the school board.

The public has a short memory if they have one at all, and after all who has time to keep track of all the things that do and don’t happen with bond money? But someone should be paying attention, because, in my opinion, the use of bond money by school districts is one of the biggest rip offs in America.

The first thing citizens need to understand is that schools today aren’t the same as they were when you went to school. That’s supposed to be a “good” thing, but it’s not. When you went to school, you had probably a principal, an assistant principal who took care of discipline, two counselors (one for the boys and one for the girls), a nurse, and that was it for administrators. You had one teacher all day in elementary school and you had about six teachers (one for each subject) when you were in junior high and high school. That’s really all that was needed.

In today’s world (for example at Cinco Ranch High School in the Katy ISD) there is a principal, seven assistant principals, eight counselors, twenty instructional aides, four security guards, twenty-three secretaries, two nurses, and two librarians. Do we really need that many people to teach kids English, history, math, science, a foreign language and fine arts?

My point is that it’s not the academic education that we all want for our kids that is being currently addressed with a bond issue. It’s all the stuff that is NOT academic that is eating up tax dollars. Look around the next time you’re in a public school, and you will see what I mean. All that other “stuff” has to be housed, and so you get to pay for it.

Can’t have a winning baseball team playing on a field without an elevator in the press box or a place to sell high priced hot dogs or a bathroom that Queen Elizabeth can use.

Can’t have the girls’ gym looking better than the boys’.

Can’t have the principal residing in an office that doesn’t equate to her station in life.

Can’t have a school that doesn’t cost at least three times as much per square foot to build as it does for the homes that surround it.

Can’t have students walk to school, or Heaven forbid, ride in a bus without air-conditioning.

Can’t allow all the students with cars to not have a place to park close to the front door.

You get my point.

Taxpayers have to decide when they’ve had enough. Taxpayers have to decide what’s important—is it paying teachers a decent wage or building Taj Mahals so that parents can “feel good” about that education that may or may not be transpiring inside? And don’t buy into the argument that the M&O part of the tax rate isn’t affected by capital improvements. As long as there is a cap on the tax rate, the M&O can be affected. Your school district is making an arbitrary decision to spend money on buildings OR to spend it on students and their teachers.

Top school administrators are behind this scam on the public, and they have used their “professional” associations to lobby the state legislature to give them all the power they now enjoy. While no one was watching, they in essence stole our public schools.

You can let them have some more of your money or you can tell them no. The bottom line is, this bond is NOT for the kids, and your kids will not suffer one minute if you vote to keep your hard earned money.

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Mary McGarr
Mother, former Texas public school teacher,
Katy ISD School Board Trustee 1991-1996

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