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Larry T. Spider

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Everything posted by Larry T. Spider

  1. Ok, who is going to watch this and report back? I have to sit though a lot of school board meetings to give a 5 min presentation and refuse to do it off the clock 😀
  2. I’m sure that Boswell did cut a deal for Pemberton parents to stay there. It’s very on brand for her and has nothing to do with my point. And yes, I know the BW and Casis parents are very connected, they basically share a neighborhood. But I stand by my statement about most BW parents wanting to be a part of a smaller, more relaxed school than Casis. I have had dozens, if not hundreds of direct conversations with BW families about this exact topic when I was an AISD employee very close to this situation. Not going to say anymore about BW on here because I’ll dox myself and don’t really have any interest in doing so.
  3. It’s more of a cultural thing. BW parents tend to like a smaller, laid back school without the hyper intense parent culture. I think they would get more pushback if Casis was the plan.
  4. I understand the portable games are frustrating and there is a potential bait and switch on the bond. None of that is fair to BW. Especially to former Pease parents that have stuck with the district. The thing that it doesn’t change is that BW is a small school serving 200 neighborhood kids at an inefficient per student cost AND the building needs 6.2 million in work. Even if you do the work, it doesn’t have the size to absorb students from other schools. I don’t know what type of work Matthews needs, but I know it can absorb BW kids while the reverse isn’t true. The district has to move to larger, financially efficient schools. It’s the complete opposite of what I believe in as an educator. Small, high quality neighborhood schools with tailored offerings are the best of public education. I always chose to work at schools like that. The state turbo fucked that reality for AISD.
  5. All of that is the opposite of the goal.
  6. The real issue is recapture and everything else is rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.
  7. It won’t tell the whole story, but I assume they will eventually have to vote on this closure plan. Will be interesting to see how the votes stack up. The people I know that are still with the district are concerned the board will try to keep too many schools open and continue the financial decline.
  8. Another general comment related to what I said about efficiency above. Note that it’s a lot of smaller elementaries on the list. Ridgetop, maplewood, sunset valley, Bryker woods…..all at about 450 or lower.
  9. I’ll try to say what I can without doxing myself. I know the building well and what it would take to get it up to a functional standard. We are talking many millions of dollars that the district doesn’t have. Hell, even some of the portables they aren’t counting are falling apart. When you look at schools with an enrollment of 350 or less, the overhead costs are insane. You are still paying a principal, AP, counselor, librarian, nurse, registrar, admin assistant, etc but not spreading the costs across 700+ students. The size causes a laundry list of other complications for the district. One very quick example: due to its small size, it has limited ability to serve special education students and any student that can’t be served in an inclusion setting has to go to another campus. The school has a lot of transfers that would likely go to another AISD school. So at the end of the day you are talking about keeping a crumbling school built in 1939 open at an extreme per student cost to serve about 200 neighborhood kids. And that number is with a lot of former Pease zoned kids, who I do feel for in this whole shit show. This district desperately needs efficiency and nothing about BW is efficient.
  10. 100%. Do it and do it all at once so that we aren’t in the same place in 5 years.
  11. Bryker Woods isn’t the sacrificial lamb their community will make it out to be. It’s a small and declining enrollment school in a dilapidated building needing millions in repairs. Very few neighborhood kids go there and it has only made it this far with transfers. The IB program is new so it’s not like people moved there with the intent of sending their kids through that program. On a cost per student basis, it has to be one of the most expensive to run in AISD.
  12. Nm, just saw the other thread on AISD.
  13. The district is at about 60% of capacity. Anything other than major closures is fiscal irresponsibility. My guess is that they will actually go for it but the school board will play politics and we get about half the closures that we actually need. The can will be kicked a few years down the road and we can play this game again in 2030.
  14. My biggest takeaway from this has nothing to do with some dead guy that did it. It’s that “we” wrongly convicted people, drug their names through the mud in the national media, locked them up, and sentenced one guy to death. We collectively seem to realize how fucked the system is when information like this comes out but never stop immediately assuming guilt after the next big arrest is made.
  15. Where is all the Project Connect money going? I live in RR, but seem to remember a decent tax increase was coming for Austinites. Never get a straight answer though. Is it being set aside for adding the new lines or is it getting mixed in with current cap metro operational costs.
  16. Yes, that’s what I watched. Shocking behavior for somebody in a critical position, with so much control over the public image and livelihood of educators that had been cleared.
  17. I watched a clip of Walters getting into it with the State Board of Education in a meeting. They kept imploring him to put a bunch of teachers who were facing disciplinary action on the agenda as they have due process rights. He would go on tangents about protecting the kids when nobody else would. Looks like some of those teachers we found to have done nothing wrong but couldn’t get cleared to go back to work because of his political stunts. The board was concerned about being sued for not following the law and he aggressively challenged people to sue. Total shitshow. Also worth noting that you can end up with certification issues for a million things that don’t involve kids. Everything from social media posts about Charlie Kirk to breaking your contract early. TEA is investigating 300+ complaints about Charlie Kirk social media posts currently…..
  18. I think late September makes me more ragey about the heat than the higher temperatures in July and August. At this point, I am just over it and watching other parts of the country drink their pumpkin spice lattes makes it worse.
  19. You know what doesn’t cause autism? Ivermectin.
  20. 40-60 indoor days in Chicago. Lulz. All of January and February will get you to that total.
  21. As an education major, there is no way I’m reading all that. Maybe one of the hotties can summarize it for me.
  22. Can’t blame them, especially if they have a waiting list regardless. The state is offering up to 30k for special education vouchers. I’m researching it for my company but the system isn’t making a ton of sense. Sounds like you take then kid and hope the state pays you enough to cover the costs with 30k being the max. Many of our students cost about 50k, so if we charged the parent 20k and the state shorts us, we are screwed. Districts would be thrilled to get some of these kids off their tab though.
  23. Also, that’s the current amount of vouchers. Now that the cat is out of the bag, the number will increase each year, just like the number of charter schools. I’ll make another post on it later but you are going to see a lot of for profit companies entering the state. You can already turn over management and operations of charters to for profit companies. Depending on your beliefs about economics and education this could be a good or bad thing.
  24. I think they are underestimating the decline they will see. When they close schools, charters are going to pop up in those neighborhoods and take a significant amount of students. West Austin will get hit by vouchers. Probably most importantly, housing prices will probably start to rise again at some point forcing more families to the burbs to be replaced by people with 0 or 1 kid. All of that isn’t even factoring in a state takeover that would also kill west Austin schools where parents have options. The district bends over backwards for those parents in many cases and that will stop with a Mike Miles type in charge.
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