The citizens group that developed the proposed Austin ISD bond package recommended adding $39 million in capital improvements to that proposal at the board of trustees’ meeting Monday night. The additions would bring the total package, which is likely to go before voters in September, to $459 million.
The Citizens Bond Advisory Committee‘s recommended increases came after several months of public feedback on the initial proposal, with parents asking for a performing arts facility at McCallum High, a science facility at Travis High, and an additional middle school in Southwest Austin. The CBAC was also swayed by an updated demographic report, released in April, that showed both staggering growth at the elementary level and a trend toward AISD students leaving the district in middle and high school.
The new recommendations include $16 million for an additional elementary school, whose location is still undesignated, in addition to the five elementaries and one middle school the committee originally recommended. The CBAC stood by their findings that another middle school was still unwarranted in the Southwest – the committee’s John Blazier said excess capacity in crowded schools like Paredes and Bailey could be addressed for the time being by boundary adjustments. But that wasn’t the case for elementaries, where an additional 3,400 students are expected over the next five years. “We were wrong,” he said. “When we looked at the data, we realized we needed another elementary.”
The CBAC also asked for $7 million to partially fund a district performing arts center (private donations would cover the balance of its $14 million price tag) and an additional $1 million to improve existing fine arts facilities at Travis and McCallum, which the committee’s Sheryl Cole said was motivated in part by the out-migration noted in the demographer’s report. “AISD can only compete with private schools and wealthier districts through these specialized programs,” she said.
The revised package would also include $6 million to improve science facilities at six of AISD’s older high schools, where the committee’s Vincent Torres said facilities were so outdated that schools could not adequately teach the district-mandated curriculum. The committee stressed that these moves were a way to address “functional equity” in the district, where older campuses serve poorer populations and state-of-the-art facilities serve more affluent students in the outskirts. “We never want to get so busy building all these new schools that we forget where we started from,” said Cole.
This article appears in May 7 • 2004.