By james art Excuse me? In a recent opinion piece in the AJ, Lubbock’s top state representative, Congressman Dustin Burroughs, argued that the recent financial struggles in Lubbock ISD and around the state are not the fault of the state legislature — and therefore not the Republican majority. He went so far as to introduce a record House Bill One in the Fourth Special Session last year. He wrote:
“…HB1 not only provided LISD with an additional $8,571,531 for the 2024-2025 school year, but also appropriated an additional $20,193,919 for the 2025-2026 school year and set that as the starting point for any future budget. Parents, students and their teachers will be happy to know that the bill also eliminates the STAAR test.
While the debate over school choice was contentious, HB1’s approach was truly sensible: It proposed education savings accounts that would empower parents of Texas’ most vulnerable students to seek the best educational environment for their child. He did this by adding new money to the system so that not a penny came from the district budget. Pretty cool, right?
HB 1 would have greatly increased funding for LISD and all school districts in the state, but the gang of education lobbyists did everything they could to kill it…”
So according to the state representative, more funding for schools than before for the next two years and eliminating STAAR. That sounds like a great deal.
But my wise father told me that if a deal sounds too good to be true, it is. He would add “read the fine print” before making a deal. The fine print – or catch – in this deal was the Education Savings Account (ESA) school voucher program. Because the school voucher program was added to the school finance bill, HB1 died. As you may recall, the school voucher program was an emergency issue for Governor Abbott in the 2023 legislative session. It did not pass during the 140 regular session. The governor called the Legislature into two special sessions for this program in the fall of 2023. The school voucher program did not pass in either of those special sessions.
What should be strikingly clear is that while Lubbock’s top state representative maintains the perspective that the HB1 deal was blown by the left and lobbyists, the school voucher program killed the deal. The voucher program was, in political science parlance, a “poison pill.” This is a term used for additions to bills that can turn the majority against and sink them.
Why was it a poison pill? Because 21 independent Republicans voted against the bill that included the voucher program. This was done in both regular and special sessions. The governor knew he was a non-starter and would not pass. Then why did you do it? To use it against those twenty-one independent Republicans in the GOP primary in March, and that’s exactly what Governor Greg Abbott did.
In this legislative game of chicken schools, teacher pay raises, security funding, etc. were allowed to dry. That is correct; your high school was held hostage to politics. Although some may not like this description, a hit is a hit and a ball is a ball.
Let it be crystal clear. The governor’s lack of legislative leadership, the lack of courage by lawmakers to not find common ground and not fund schools, and the governor’s willingness to register twenty-one independent House Republicans to vote against a school voucher plan to challenge them at Republican Elementary forced local independent school districts (ISDs) to make tough budget decisions. Many ISDs went into the red, including Lubbock ISD. In short, they were the victims of weak special sessions.
While completely sidestepping any kind of responsibility for the failures of not passing a robust, stand-alone school safety bill, raising teacher pay, or tying school finances to inflation, leaders want to blame one or both; COVID-19 money or taxpayer-funded lobbying.
Although some argue that groups like the Texas School Boards Association and the Texas Association of School Administrators criminally worked against the will of the people to kill the voucher program, the real reason this came about was politics. It has long been a Republican priority to kill lobbying by school boards, cities and counties. Now that associations are being labeled “gangs” and blamed for the failure of the school voucher program, what better reason for the Republican-led Legislature to take up the measure in January?
Blaming the lack of funding on mismanagement of the COVID-19 surplus is also an exception. The governor did not take responsibility for the schools being turned upside down in their budgets. The reason this is a copout is because the legislature had two regular sessions during that time when the federal government distributed dollars to schools. Under the governor’s leadership, the Legislature could have increased the state’s per-pupil funding, but did not.
It’s not as if the state doesn’t have – or doesn’t have – the means to achieve this. The state is running a huge budget surplus of about $20 billion. The aid money is available. However, the will is not like that.
State leaders can intimidate voters and shirk responsibility all they want. But facts are stubborn things. Public schools are bleeding because of state politics and the lack of courage on the part of legislators to vote for their districts. Are you concerned that your local ISD, its students and professionals have been hung out to dry because of politics? Me too.
Drew Landry is an assistant professor of government at South Plains College. His views do not necessarily represent those of the SPC.