It was not over capacity. In the spring, they were told they were under capacity. More importantly, parents were told that portables would be moved into Lamar so that Lamar classrooms would not be packed to the walls when they were going to close the middle schools for this fall. AISD had no problems with portables when they needed to placate parents over class sizes being too big at Lamar. Portables became bad over the summer when AISD needed them to count against schools.
Bond money that was already allocated was not being used at BW that would’ve addressed certain issues that were also used against it. Other schools received their bond money within that timeframe, ours certainly did, and a lot of our stuff was not critical. When we drove by BW every now and then, there was one of those big bond money signs out front and then apparently it mysteriously disappeared in the lead up to all of this. It’s a hot mess on AISD’s part and I’m very concerned about the boundary changes that were coming out of that because they affected my kids’ middle school and high school, and because they seemed to have lost focus on the state takeover. And I wonder what else was going on.
Moving forward, AISD Needs to be hyper-focused on the state takeover and I’m concerned that they won’t be. If or when the state takes over, there will be more than enough parents who have the means who will move their kids to private schools, and plenty of parents on the fringes of Austin who may not be able to afford a fancy private school, but maybe tempted to move a few miles down the road to a different school district. A lot more schools would have to be closed if that happens, and I don’t see those students coming back to AISD when the state lets it go several years down the road.