EDUCATION

West Texas education leaders discuss future of their field at Texas Tribune symposium

Alex Driggars
Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
Texas Tribune hosts TribCast with Texas Tribune regional editor Nic Garcia, Texas Tribune High Plains reporter Jayme Lozano, Texas Tribune East Texas reporter Pooja Salhotra, Texas Tech Public Media news director Sarah Self-Walbrick and Lubbock Avalanche-Journal editor Adam Young, Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022, at Allen Theater at Texas Tech.

LUBBOCK — During a Friday session of “The Future of Rural Texas” symposium hosted by the Texas Tribune at Texas Tech, education leaders from the South Plains, High Plains and Texoma discussed a spectrum of education and policy topics ranging from school safety, to funding, to innovation in education.

Plainview superintendent H.T. Sanchez; state Rep. Ken King, R-Canadian; JuliAnn Mazachek, president of Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls; and Amarillo College president Russell Lowery-Hart participated in the hourlong panel. The discussion was moderated by Nic Garcia, the West and East Texas regional editor for the Tribune.

The discussion was part of a two-day symposium hosted by the Texas Tribune featuring panels and discussions on a variety of topics impacting rural Texas.

School safety

To start the discussion, Garcia asked Sanchez what his district needs from the Texas Legislature in its upcoming session “to ensure that what happened at Uvalde does not happen to one of your schools.”

Sanchez said he expects legislators to be reasonable and not “knee-jerk react” to safety concerns.

“Right now, across the state of Texas, every superintendent, every principal and every teacher is on high alert because we’re waiting for the state to send somebody to go and rattle doors and check to see if our facilities are safe and secure,” Sanchez said. “I think sometimes that overreaction puts us into a place where we create undue anxiety and fear with our teachers and with our kids.”

“They’re afraid of being called out in the newspaper because a school failed a safety audit,” he added.

More:How a false tale of police heroism in Uvalde spread and unraveled

King, who represents close to 70 school districts from the top of the Panhandle to the Permian Basin, suggested using part of the estimated $27 billion state budget surplus to improve safety by “hardening” schools, addressing mental health and cracking down on truancy.

“I certainly can’t speak for the governor, but I believe school safety will be an emergency item. It certainly should be,” King said. “But as the superintendent said, it’s not one-size-fits-all.”

“The cornerstone is funding, and funding needs to be in a real way, in a meaningful way that represents local control,” he added.

Texas Tribune regional editor Nic Garcia speaks during TribCast, Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022, at Allen Theater at Texas Tech.

School funding and the teacher shortage

Sanchez said numerous superintendents across Texas are advocating for a change in the way the state funds local school districts. Currently, Texas funds schools based on “average daily attendance,” which is calculated based on the number of students who actually show up for class during a given time. Sanchez said administrators would like to see a shift toward funding based on students registered.

“If the students don’t show up or do show up, we still have to pay the teachers, we have to pay the custodians, we have to pay the lights,” Sanchez said. “All of that doesn’t change just because 94% of the students show up on a given day.”

King agreed: “Maybe enrollment-based funding is the way to go.”

Sanchez and King also agreed that school vouchers, which would allow families to put state public education dollars toward private school tuition, is wrong for Texas. When asked by Garcia if they opposed the policy, both panelists simply nodded their heads in agreement. They suggested an ongoing teacher shortage could be tied to the voucher idea in complex ways.

“When you think about us moving to a voucher system where parents can make a decision of whether or not they’re going to take funding to public education, think about how that further defines what has already been a challenge with inflation and teacher shortages” Sanchez said. “Every school superintendent I visit with, we’re all battling to try to outdo each other and pay teachers more so that we can steal from each other, because the pool is becoming a smaller and smaller pool of people to pull from.”

“The most dangerous thing we could do as an American society is to under-educate our population,” Sanchez added. “If you think about the topple of any great society, it's on the heels of mass ignorance. So, if we want to see that, then we need to continue to defund public education.”

King thinks the shortage could also be linked in part to “social justice” bills the legislature has previously passed, like banning Critical Race Theory, which he says are intended to make the voucher program more appealing at the cost of reducing teacher morale.

“Listen — I don't like this CRT stuff. And what I am really the most concerned about is this criminalizing of the education community, and we're doing it so we can make the voucher thing look good,” King said.

King also suggested completely scrapping the state’s existing education code, including how schools are funded, and starting from scratch during this session.

“Here’s why you can’t fix an old system: Everybody’s got a piece of candy hidden somewhere,” King said. “You can’t fix a system like that, but when you throw it all in the trash and start over, then you can create an equitable system, and that’s what I’m hoping we get to do for you this session.”

Innovation in higher education

Mazachek and Lowery-Hart both cast vision for the future of higher education in the state, which they say is vastly different now than it has been for past generations.

Lowery-Hart

Garcia asked Lowery-Hart how Amarillo College maintains its high completion rate. His answer was simple: love.

“We love our students. It’s systemic, it’s intentional. We build in academic and social supports,” Lowery-Hart said.

“We think of our typical student, Maria. She is the typical student at Amarillo College. She’s the typical student in rural Texas. She’s smart, and she’s ambitious, and she’s capable, but you often ignore her to your own peril. Your companies need her. She’s first-gen. She’s a Hispanic female. She’s working two part-time jobs while she’s going full time enrolled at Amarillo College and raising a kid. She’s the hope of our community, but she can’t become the reality of our community without systems of support that love her to her success rather than blame her for our community’s failures,” Lowery-Hart added, with applause following.

Mazachek agreed that student needs are simply different in this new generation of higher ed.

“I love the way you talked about your student Maria,” Mazachek told Lowery-Hart. “The student body is changing, what they expect from us is changing, what they want when they leave us is changing, and we need to be able to serve that variety of pathways that students need to be able to create that workforce that we need in the future.”