Feedback: October 17, 2025

Save Our Schools

Dear Editor,

I woke up at 4am thinking about this last night. In fact I’m still awake and seething. I am an Austinite, but I live north – my kids attend Round Rock ISD. Nevertheless, it makes me sick what our state government is doing to our public schools. Let me spell it out: Republicans are waging a culture war and the casualties are the livelihoods of women and the futures of children.

First, for decades they willfully ignore all research and direct expertise on how children learn best. They institute developmentally inappropriate measures of success that have nothing to do with best teaching practices. Then they pull funding for schools when kids don’t achieve. At the same time, they take HALF of the money the community raises in property taxes out of their schools, while simultaneously ignoring the rising cost of living for teachers for YEARS. They have plenty of money left over to fix this ($33 billion surplus in 2023), but do they? NOPE. They make schools wait another 2 years. (Remember this is also after forcing teachers to prioritize their jobs over their own/their families’ health during the pandemic. Amazingly, some of them didn’t leave. Many did. Most with any better options did.) When they do finally pass any kind of wage adjustment, it is a pittance and never tied to any real-world cost of living.

Meanwhile, these same state Republicans decide to start funding with public tax dollars their donors’ preferred private schools. Unlike public schools, these schools get to pick and chose their students, curriculums, and how to measure their own success. They call this “school choice.” Which school system would you choose to work in? Learn in? Send your kids to if you could afford it? So yeah, now chronically underfunded public schools employing demoralized (or brand-new) teachers who are expected to teach to a ridiculous standard that isn’t good for kids and no one can achieve, are failing kids in big cities. Well DUH!

But guess what? It’s not just any kids – it’s the kids who can’t afford to go anywhere else. Disproportionately black and brown kids. Immigrant kids. Disabled kids. And it’s not just any employees – it’s mostly women. And those state Republicans? Not just anyone either – take a look at a picture – it’s mostly white, mostly male Republicans. At any point these men, empowered by our state constitution to maintain our public education system, could have saved these schools. But they didn’t want to. It is by design, and it’s despicable. So, as these meetings of the AISD school board – a group of unpaid electeds who care, PROBABLY THE MOST, about educating all children – commence, let’s not forget who should bear the brunt of the community outrage as they are forced to choose which of your neighborhood public elementary schools must close first.

Reader Recommendation

Dear Editor,

People are right to be angry at fiscal mismanagement by the [Mayor Kirk] Watson [City] Council. The tax rate election is happening because they gave police so much money in the latest contract there’s now no room for everything else. But they already did that, it can’t be clawed back.

The only two Council members that opposed the contract were Zo Qadri and Mike Siegel. All others and the mayor knowingly chose to cause this tax rate election and flagrantly misled the public with phony budget projections to justify it. The whole episode was egregious and angering.

My recommendation based on what is best for Austin: Vote FOR the TRE, then vote against every incumbent but those two for the next two years. The police contract was a bad faith decision and Council deserves to be held accountable. But voting down the TRE would gut city services in ways that are irresponsible and unwise.

Judy Gradford

We’re All Confused

Dear Editor,

I’m confused.

During his 2016 campaign, Trump said Mexico was sending us murderers, rapists and drug dealers. To keep them out, he promised to build a wall that Mexico would pay for.

Abbott launched Operation Lone Star on March 6, 2021, to “combat the smuggling of people and drugs into Texas.” So why is my red state deploying the Texas National Guard to protect Chicagoans?

Does ICE harass low-wage workers in blue states to encourage them to relocate to pro-MAGA areas? Here these “dangerous” immigrants, desperate to make a living, might risk their safety to harvest crops, build roads, and take care of the sick and elderly. Economically speaking, red states prosper.

Trump and Abbott also might like the visuals. It’s one thing to see helicopters and masked federal agents create pain and shatter families and kidnap immigrants off the streets in traditionally Democratic cities. Such chaos in Republican cities would never do, for it would challenge the GOP’s supremely hypocritical law-and-order image.

This blatantly illegal challenge to the right of peaceful protest actually might just be a distraction so Americans abandon concern over their health insurance and forget the Epstein investigation.

Barbara Chiarello

Prop Q Context

Dear Editor,

Something important is missing from the for and against columns related to Prop Q – national context. Austin has been subject to years of revenue limitations from a Republican-dominated legislature, and now we face waves of cuts to federal grants propagated in service of a lie from Republicans that our Democratically controlled cities are hellholes. 

With little evidence that crime is higher in blue cities, or that they are terrible places to live, Republicans apparently hope to defund parks, pools, and libraries while leaving unhoused people no option but arrest and jail for a bed and a meal. Will that produce the images of an urban hellhole they want?

If we continue to help people rather than dismiss them – Austin can stand as an example of what happens when democracy works, as it always has, better than the alternative. That is why I will vote for Prop Q.

Robin M. Kirschenbaum

AISD: Slow Down

Dear Editor,

At the Oct. 9 Austin ISD school board meeting, the message from parents, students, and union members from Education Austin was clear and united: Slow down the process. Listen. Do what is right. Be transparent.

Families spoke with passion about what their neighborhood schools mean to them, places where children feel safe, supported, and seen. These schools are not just facilities on a spreadsheet; they are living, breathing parts of our community. Closing them without true engagement, transparent data, and a thoughtful long-term plan would be a grave mistake. The academic achievement of students should be the top priority. 

Our students, families, teachers and classified staff deserve transparency and courage from district leaders, not blame. We need policies that strengthen our schools, not surrender them. The solution isn’t to close schools; it’s to invest in them, protect them, and make them places where every Austin child is welcomed and loved.

Austin’s public schools have already endured too much loss. We have watched beloved campuses close and communities fracture while systemic issues such as  housing affordability, inequitable funding, and the unchecked growth of charter schools continue to drain enrollment and resources.

We cannot afford to lose our public schools, our democratically elected school board, or our belief in the power of public education to transform lives. This is what the dismantling of public education feels like and it’s time we say enough.

AISD must honor the voices of its people. Listen to the community. Slow down. Do what is right. Austin’s families, children, educators and classified staff  deserve nothing less.