WHY I AM NOT VOTING FOR THE BOND PART I ACADEMICS:
Why I'm Not Voting for the 2014 Bond
By Mary McGarr
First, I suggest that the reader go to the 2013 Bond Information on this web site and read the three articles I wrote last fall on why I was not supporting the 2013 Bond.
Now that we are looking at a $758,000,000.00 bond, which when costs and interest are added will be about $1.2 billion, there are many other reasons that have come up for me as reasons not to vote for this bond.
The first, and most important, is the issue of where the District is choosing to put its funds.
I think that most of our money should go toward the curriculum and the academic educations of our students. After all, that is why we have schools, however they look, whoever builds them, and wherever they are--to academically educate our children.
Katy ISD is NOT educating our students. The school board and the administrators have bought in to the dumbing down of students--the essence of which is coming from left-leaning liberals and progressives in our country. Either our local people are not smart enough to see what is happening right in front of their eyes, or they are complicit. I personally think it's a little of both.
We have a school board that is more interested in personal power and local recognition and eating free on the taxpayers than they are in what happens to YOUR child as he moves into the world.
YOUR child is not being prepared for HIS future. He's being prepared for the future of large corporations who need dumbed down people to take mediocre jobs and keep quiet about their low wages.
If you do not understand what I am saying here, you need to do your homework. Read about the efforts of the Business Roundtable in this regard. Read about the School to Work federal law.
Many of us have spent long hours trying to keep the liberal curriculum out of our Katy schools. Common Core and CSCOPE have been outlawed in Texas, and yet I still get notes from KISD parents telling me about and sending me photos of Common Core and CSCOPE worksheets that have been given to THEIR children in KISD schools.
By law, Katy ISD should have changed their curriculum last year so that it was aligned with the new STAAR test. That they did not do so is a violation of state law. Unfortunately, no one is enforcing that law! And it won't be enforced until parents rise up and complain.
Katy ISD, contrary to the trumpeting by our superintendent, did not do great on the STAAR Test. The bar for "passing" had to be set so low at 37% (can you even imagine saying that 37% passing is great!), that any dog or cat coul
d have passed it! It's that bad.The Commissioner and the school districts don't know what to do. They're hoping that unenlightened, naive parents will swoop in and demand that we get rid of the STAAR test. Don't let them fool YOU!!! Pay attention to this issue and make them live up to the standards that were set by a Conservative Republican State Board of Education composed of ELECTED members.
Don't be fooled into thinking that KISD is providing your children with an excellent education. They are not. We have superior students here because many of them are taught at home by their parents, and so they excel in academics, but our schools had absolutely nothing to do with that excellence!
So KISD's first reason why you should vote for their bond doesn't hold water. Their first duty is to educate academically, and they have failed miserably.