Texas Jeff

If you missed Whiplash, it's on Hulu.

I just compared my city of Austin tax bill from the start of Adler's term up until the tax bill I paid in January. It's 47% higher now than seven years ago. Some of that would have happened with inflation but not 47%. My Austin Energy bill is up 35% over the same time period and I know I use less power and water now than I did then. With inflation that number should have been 20-25%. The bucks are flowing in -- they just are not making it to the people charged with delivering clean water to our community.

Das Pflufferer

They could knock down Jester West and go tall. Build a parking garage under it, a rec center at ground level, and a new supertall dorm on top. it's kinda close to Gregory, so that doesn't help spread the gyms out. It would be nice to have a rec center in west campus but UT doesn't have the room.

BTW, the current School of Social Work building used to be a Austin junior high school. It predates Austin ISD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_Junior_High_School https://www.statesman.com/story/news/local/2019/06/29/austins-first-desegregated-junior-high-celebrates-class-reunion/4793366007/ You can still see what was the gym, or maybe it's the auditorium, if you walk between the school and the swim center. It's a pretty cool little building for a middle school.

Let's be honest, no one's getting fired over this shit. More like chewed out. They've been chewed out before.

They sent the samples in via Cap Metro.

From the city press release: A multiple barrier failure treatment technique violation ... that was my hunch....

From two days ago:

Emily is not going to have a great week... My wife is watching figure skaters drink water before they go skate on frozen water and suddenly I'm jealous of places on earth with potable water...

Mini-Ditka, I give the Cowboys fans a chance -- that would be a fair fight. Full sized Ditka, no way, I gotta take da Bears.

Hypothetical situation... What if all of the Bears fans were, like, 14 inches tall? Who would be louder, regular sized Cowboys fans or the Bears mini-fans? One advantage of the mini-fans would be that you could really pack 'em in, tiny shoulder to tiny shoulder. One obvious disadvantage would be that they might be unable to see over the seat in front of them, thus making coordinated cheering less effective. Thoughts?

Who knows? Most schools play one decent school plus a slate of creme puffs. At least when conference champions battle it out for a championship, you can argue that it's a "national" championship.

Outside of their own conference, the two teams that played for the "national championship" beat: * #14 Clemson * #4 Cincinnati * #3 Michigan And these non-ranked teams: * UAB * Charleston Southern * Georgia Tech * Miami * Mercer * Southern Miss * New Mexico State Wow, "national" champions....

Check out this site, if you are curious as to how any Texas district has been funded over the past five years: https://rptsvr1.tea.texas.gov/school.finance/forecasting/financial_reports/1920_stacked_bar_charts.html You can compare any Texas school district to any other Texas school district, and it will break down how much money each district has had to spend on education and where it came from. Austin has lost a bunch to recapture but it does have access to about the same amount of money as surrounding districts. Some of those are poorer and some are wealthier. None are talking about cutting 21 million from the secondary school budget by overloading teachers. Austin has tiny schools. If you look at Austin plus all surrounding districts, there are 37 major high schools. Austin ISD operates 9 of the 11 smallest high schools. There are 63 middle schools in the area, and Austin has 7 of the 8 smallest middle schools. I think that's a lot of the bloat you mention. It's more expensive to maintain lots of extra buildings and hire all of those additional principals, admins, coaches, etc.

I believe the preferred term is "encampments experiencing people experiencing homelessness"

Looks like everyone in the UT system is in except UT-Permian Basin, UT-RGV and UT-Tyler. Way to go orange team. UT-Arlington was basically a grad school for DFW area tech companies in the 1990s. They were doing remote learning at company campuses 30 years ago. Hopefully they've built a little campus spirit since then. My company paid for my masters at UTA and I had great classes with professors that cared and knew your name, but there was not much to the campus. UT-Dallas ... we visited when our kids were considering schools. Lots of money to hand out, high SAT scores, nice new buildings connected by tunnels. Lots of emphasis on moving you through college at low expense and connecting you to a good job after school. But campus life looked about as exciting as going to college in Richardson sounds when you say it out loud. Still, it is miles beyond what it was in the 1980s.

Man, I don't know how that is possible. I know AISD teachers at two high schools, a magnet school and a "traditional school". Most of them are working 50-60 hrs per week to keep up with teaching, grading, training, planning, office hours, things the district is requiring for equity initiatives, 504 accomodations, and it just goes on and on. Different levels of students require different things, but the teachers I know are already stretched pretty thin.

Looks like Austin ISD may ask secondary teachers to teach 7 out of 8 periods next year, instead of 6 of 8 this year. Effectively, each teacher will have 16% more students which will allow them to eliminate a large number of teaching jobs. Why would a new teacher take a job with AISD, pay social security AND teach 16% more, when they can go to ANY surrounding district and work less, not pay social security, and work in nicer buildings?

Bowie… Bowie is slightly larger than Westlake and smaller than LT. when bowie makes the playoffs it forces LT and Westlake into different divisions.

It's proportional, not an exact number. I don't fully understand the math, but it's kinda like this: The total value of the property in the town is one number. You get to keep the tax you raise on some fraction of that number, based on the number of kids in your district and a funding formula. The rest of it goes to recapture. So if you lowered taxes, yes, your recapture would drop, but so would funding to your schools. Recapture districts are almost forced to tax at the maximum amount they can just to keep basic funding for their schools. If worked as you suggested, every district would do exactly what you suggested -- set the rate at the exact level where there was no recapture. BTW, recapture is slowly going to go away in future years. The law changed in 2019 and districts are now going through tax rate compression, which means that if the property values go up by more than 2.5% then the rate is "compressed" so that the school tax you pay only goes up by 2.5%. Austin ISD's tax rates are dropping because of compression and eventually the recapture portion should drop. In theory the state is going to step in and provide more funding to make up the difference, but I will believe that when I see it.

Austin ISD has a very open transfer policy. Austin LBJ has about 800 students in a building designed for 2000. AISD has 20,000 students at the high school level. There are still over 3900 kids at Eastside, LBJ, Northeast and Navarro, even though the district has shrunk. LBJ has a Black population of 33%. I think Northeast (the old Reagan) is in second place at 13%. If you are a Black family in AISD and you want your kid to be on a team with more than a few other Black students, you need to transfer to LBJ. If I had a kid with some athletic talent that was slated to attend one of the other schools in the area, I'd move them to LBJ. The LBJ staff deserves credit for building good athletic programs that are now attracting families to play there.

The next 20 years are going to interesting for AISD. Austin gentrification is causing the district to be smaller, but wealthier. Just in my time with the district, the percentage of economically disadvantaged kids has dropped from 55% down to 48%. The district is going to continue to get smaller and wealthier. They have started to replace obsolete buildings all over the district. They need to figure out how to pay teachers enough to live in Austin, how to get as many kids in new buildings as soon as possible., and how to catch up to the amenities the suburban schools now have.

We had a good experience at O. Henry with two kids, but that was four years ago. It's kind of a self-fulfilling thing. If lots of folks think it's a good school and want to send their kids there, get involved and donate a bit, it's a good school. If the reputation goes the other way, maybe not so great. I would suggest touring the school and asking friends ahead of you about the state of the school before you commit. O. Henry could greatly benefit from a new building. They were slated to get a rebuild in a 7 year window starting with the 2017 bond, but the current long range plan is in doubt after the school board turned over. The Casis crowd might be light right now because of the PTA funding issues, construction and COVID, but all that should eventually resolve. I think the state leg overruled the AISD policy preventing PTA donations to schools. Wherever you go for middle school, try to get your kids in an activity that they can do all the way through high school. I'm a big fan of the band program at O. Henry and Austin High. Have them try band and maybe a sport in middle school and they'll probably pick one of those in the 8th or 9th grade to focus on. Once they get to Austin High, the band program has it's own building and it becomes a home for the band kids. Athletics got a big boost from the 2017 bond ... they're no threat to Westlake or LT but it's still nice to see something new at the school. Many of the "great" programs, at whatever middle or high school you want to talk about, are great because one teacher has put a ton of effort into making it great. Chemistry, physics, government, band, theatre, whatever you hear is "great" about a school is probably due to the incredible efforts of an underpaid teacher. Right now, a lot of those teachers are pretty stressed out and some of them are leaving ... taking the "great" program with them. AISD could make life easier on teachers and focus on trying to get them max compensation, but I don't think they are doing that. I will say that today's kids, from what I have seen at Austin High, tend to support each other and tolerate differences in people much, much more than when I was in high school.