SPEECH I MADE TO THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES ABOUT MCDONALD JUNIOR HIGH:

When McDonald Junior High was proposed in 1989, the school was going to be built on the wrong side of the freeway in my opinion.  The growth south of the freeway was 10%. North of the freeway it was .05% .  ALL the billboards advertising new housing had arrows pointing south, not north.  Obviously there was more to why the school was built where it was than met the eye.

In a debate with my first school board opponent, Garry Weiss, he suggested at a candidate's forum that "most of the growth in our school district was north of the freeway."  I nearly fell out of my chair, but I also knew that Mr. Weiss was a very large landowner on the north side of the freeway, so that was wishful thinking on his part.

I spoke to the Board about the matter, even though McDonald was pretty much already built, and here is what I had to say (my obvious concern for these issues started a long time ago!)

Speech given to board during 1990-1991 School Year

"Dr. Williams, Members of the Board, Dr. Hayes,

My name is Mary McGarr. My family lives in Nottingham Country, and I have a son at Taylor High School.

I registered to speak to you tonight because I have many concerns about your apparent decision to rezone students at the junior high level in the Katy Independent School District.

My first concern is that over the last ten years you have NEVER built a school in the right place and/or at the right time, ever! Schools have been located too far from the populace, or they have been constructed too soon or too late. This lack of wisdom on your part has been true for Taylor and Mayde Creek High schools, Mayde Creek and Memorial Parkway junior highs, and Nottingham Country, Mayde Creek, Sundown, Golbow and Pattison elementaries. Your lack of foresight is remarkable but it is in keeping with everything else you do that is reactive instead of proactive.

If you were so concerned with where the student populations were centered that you had to spend $32,000 for a consultant, why didn’t you do so sooner than three months ago? Why didn’t you obtain this information three years ago when you were deciding where to build McDonald Junior High? That information would certainly have been more useful to you at that time! The fact is you didn’t care where the growth was in this school district because, for political reasons, you were determined to build a junior high on land which you purchased in order to help someone pay their delinquent school taxes and so that you could empty out Katy Junior High of children you choose NOT to have enrolled at Katy Junior High. Your own statistics told you before you called a special meeting to approve the building of McDonald Junior High last April there was only ½% growth north of I-10, while there was 10% growth south of I-10. The only reason there is ANY proposed growth north of I-10 is because you have built a new junior high there. Many patrons served for years beginning in 1985 on your Demographic Studies Committee using the same statistics from the West Houston Association that were recently used by CDS Research and at no cost to the taxpayers. These statistics told you precisely what needed to be done to equalize school populations with already existing facilities, and some of you were too cowardly to do what should have been done.

It also concerns me that you have arbitrarily changed capacity figures for Katy Junior High from the 1000 figure that appears in all of your Demographics Committee hand-outs from as late as 1988 to the 700 figure at this time. Even if computer labs and science labs were added at that school which may have lowered its capacity, one would have to assume that the same facilities were also installed at our other junior highs thus also lowering their capacities? But that is not the case. Mayde Creek at 1200 and West Memorial at 1100 have remained the same. Memorial Parkway on the other hand has been strangely increased since 1988 from 1200 to 1275 and this increase has come when one entire hall has been dedicated to special education thus removing it from use by the regular student body. Since your press releases also indicate that temporary buildings are not included in these totals, I find this manipulation of figures that you are performing to justify building McDonald Junior High in the wrong place as highly questionable if not totally unethical. You have done this simply so you can say that Memorial Parkway Junior High is not full!

When you load up Memorial Parkway Junior High and empty out Katy Junior High which is what you must do since you built McDonald in the wrong place, you are creating a situation where you are spending a great deal more money per student at one end of the district than you are at the other. Citing your own statistics as generated in your 1989-1990 Annual Performance Report, last year with 100 more students at Katy Junior High than you are planning for next year, you spent $1,246 more per student at Katy Junior High than you did at Memorial Parkway Junior High. The pupil teacher ratio for regular education last year was 21/1 at Katy Junior High while it was 26/1 at Memorial Parkway Junior High. When MPJH is overcrowded, lunch shifts are shorter because students wait in longer lines, extracurricular activities such as athletics and special classes like band, music and art are proportionally limited to a fewer number of students meeting in smaller amounts of time. The library center is unable to meet the demands for books. The nurse at MPJH must serve more than twice as many students. All central facilities as well as the campus administrators and support personnel become stressfully overworked. Teachers must have larger classes, thus reducing time spent individually with students as well as increasing the number of papers which must be graded.

All of you have been elected to represent all of us. It is not proper for you to be involved in land deals, construction projects, the tax appraisal process, or the moving of students for prejudicial reasons to satisfy your own vested interests. You are depriving most of the children in this school district of the quality education that the 88% of us who are paying 90% of the taxes expect them to have. You have dragged your feet making this decision so that patrons will not become active voters in the school board election. Those of us in Houston’s suburbs have come to expect your reluctance to deal with meaningful issues until the election is over every spring.

You collectively are responsible for this mess that you have created, and your inability to deal with it honestly is unbelievable. Please try to remember that you were elected to represent taxpayers and children, not certain large land owners who seem to have a stranglehold on this district."

[Of note is the fact that we now have Morton Ranch High School and Morton Ranch Junior High on Franz Road (on either side of Garry Weiss's business office).  And now we have another York Interests, LTD property in the KISD file.]