Dozens of campuses in North Texas are set to close amid budget shortfalls. Independent school districts in Coppell, Lewisville, Plano and Richardson, major suburbs in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, cite budget shortfalls and declining enrollment. This is part of a nationwide trend of school closures, including schools in California, Illinois, Wisconsin and Colorado.
This is a list of specific closures.
Coppell ISD closes Pinkerton Elementary School. The district’s budget shortfall for the 2024-25 fiscal year is between $7.5 million and $8.7 million, and current projections suggest an $18 million budget shortfall by the 2027-28 fiscal year. Lewisville ISD will close Creekside, Garden Ridge, Highland Village and BB Owen. Plano ISD will close Davis and Forman elementary schools, as well as Armstrong and Carpenter middle schools. The district is operating on a $24 million budget shortfall, and Richardson ISD will close Greenwood Hills, Spring Ridge, Spring Valley and Thurgood Marshall elementary schools. Richardson faces a $28 million budget shortfall due to school closures as part of a broader austerity plan called Project Right-Size.
Parents and students attended the board meeting to voice their opposition to the move. The Dallas Morning News reported that more school closures in North Texas are “likely.”
The number of jobs being cut was not mentioned in company media or confirmed at a board meeting, but hundreds, if not thousands, of employees could be affected. In addition to teachers, janitors, cafeteria workers, librarians and others will lose their jobs if these schools close.
Local teachers unions have done nothing to mobilize people against the closures. Alliance AFT, the local American Federation of Teachers affiliate serving Allen, Frisco, Garland, Plano and Richardson, has posted on its website and social media about school closures, despite the fact that school closures mean the loss of schools. has not been announced publicly. member’s own work.
On June 18, the Texas Teachers Association, which is part of the NEA, published a post regarding school closures, pointing out that children forced to change schools during school closures are having a negative impact on their future education and employment. Other than this observation, nothing has been said since.
The budget shortfall is due in no small part to the end of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds provided at the beginning of the pandemic. These have been allowed to expire by the Biden administration as part of an anti-science effort to declare the pandemic over and shift funding from education to war. This exacerbated the situation in which U.S. education funding lags hundreds of billions of dollars behind international standards.
A record $895 billion military budget is aimed at wars with Russia and China and requires cuts in other areas, including public education.
But this is just a down payment on what the incoming Trump administration has in store. The new government, which has appointed wrestling mogul Linda McMahon as secretary of education, will cut public spending on education and other social infrastructure, turn public schools into charter schools, and attack the fundamental right to an education. I’m planning something.
School closures are justified because schools are facing declining enrollment and budget shortfalls. Districts have collectively lost tens of thousands of students over the past decade, and this trend is expected to continue. Plano has seen a decline of 7,750 people over the past 12 years, and other neighborhoods are seeing similar trends. Dallas County, where most of the schools are located, now has 24,000 fewer children under age 9 than in 2012.
Much of this has to do with an aging population, which is in no small part a product of a society in which childcare, housing/rent, and overall living costs become increasingly untenable because most jobs do not keep up with inflation.
It is true that schools receive funding based on attendance, so declining attendance has an impact on school budgets, and this formula is deliberately set up to take funding away from schools. Less attendance means less funding. However, the corporate news approach is to arbitrarily highlight facts in order to justify current school closure policies. It simply claims that schools must close because enrollment is declining and there is a budget shortfall (perhaps because there is “no money”). This is a wrong conclusion and method. The many unstated assumptions on which this argument is based do not stand up to scrutiny.
According to the St. Louis Fed, if the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area were considered a country, it would have a population of 7.64 million people and a GDP of $692 billion, making it the 21st largest economy in the world, along with Sweden. , Belgium and Poland.
But despite having a smaller population and higher GDP than all of these named countries, DFW schools consistently have higher student-to-teacher ratios.
Louisville’s ratio is 13:1, Plano’s is 14:1 and Richardson’s is 13:1, according to U.S. News & World Report. However, according to OECD data, the student-teacher ratio is 11:1 in Poland, 12:1 in Sweden and 9:1 in Belgium.
The defense of public education not only praises Mr. McMahon, but also speaks to the warmongering of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy, including American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who supports Israel’s genocide against Gaza and the U.S.-NATO war. Incompatible. against Russia in Ukraine.
Teachers and staff members seeking to oppose the destruction of public education are joining the ranks of educators to join with teachers across the United States and workers in other industries around the world to protect jobs, public education, and the social rights of workers. You should participate in committees. class.
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