URGENT: House Appropriations Committee Hearing is meeting about Pub Ed funding. Take 3 minutes to leave a comment.
Background: The House Appropriations Committee is holding a hearing today and tomorrow to decide how to spend our $24 billion surplus in the general revenue fund. There's also $28 billion in the Rainy Day Fund, according to the Texas State Comptroller.
According to a Rice University study, 73% of our Texas school districts are in a financial crisis, with nearby districts closing schools, firing librarians and teachers, and asking hard-working families to continue to carry the burden of funding our public schools through volunteer work, sky-high property taxes, and VATRES, like our Prop A. It's not just us. It's all over the state.
Our teachers are now paid $10,000 below the national average, our students funded at $4,000 below the national average, and the average tenure of a new teacher in our classrooms is 3 years, causing instability to not only them, but our schools and classrooms.
What you can do: Take three minutes to write a comment that will become part of the public record of this committee hearing: https://comments.house.texas.gov/home?c=c030
They will ask what bill you're commenting on, feel free to comment on any (or all!) of them but the script below is for the Overview of Public Education Funding and the Foundation School Program, which is the first conversation on the Feb 19 list.
Organization/Representing*
You will see this required question when you fill in your contact information. I highly encourage you to list yourself as a Texas mom/dad/grandparent/concerned citizen. This is an easy way of letting them know you are part of a bigger, Texas-sized, movement. They will know that for every comment, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who feel the same way but don't have the knowledge or freedom to comment.
Let's dazzle them, y'all. It take 3 minutes.
Sample script - use any or all this (it's a lot but you're allowed 3,000 word), and please personalize with your own experience if you have the time:
Thank you for your service to the people of our state and I pray you will use your power of the purse wisely on behalf of our children.
Our public schools have been underfunded since 2011, when you balanced the state budget by cutting education funding by $5.4 billion. Since almost 90% of the funds in that budget go directly to the people who support our children in the classrooms, that was a devastating blow to children in those classrooms that has not yet been remedied.
Your "record investment" in public education in 2019 didn't even get us back to 2009 levels, when you account for inflation. We haven't seen a significant increase in funding that didn't come with expensive mandates attached since then, despite a global pandemic and a couple of years of painful inflation that followed.
Our teachers are getting paid $10k less than their peers in other states; our students are receiving funding that is, in some cases, a third of the resources the children they will competing against for jobs in the future currently receive in other states; and our counselor-to-student ratios are a fraction of what is recommended by health professionals. This is on you. You could change this.
It's raining. You have the umbrella. You could take your constitutional responsibility seriously and use that surplus, dipping into the rainy day fund if you need to, to get the money back into our schools that they deserve through an increase in the basic allotment, that, unlike a teacher stipend, would support ALL the professionals in our schools supporting our children.
Thank you for doing the right thing for the future of Texas and the children who are watching.
PLEASE SHARE WIDELY!
Thanks,
Daph
Comentários