“Graciela’s family lived in a tiny town—her step-father worked for the police department and everyone knew everyone. Her step-father was physically abusive to both Graciela, her mother and her two younger siblings.

“We can’t report anything to the police about what he does to us,” Graciela said. “He’ll just hurt us more.”

Graciela was terrified of what he might do if he found out she was pregnant, and she didn’t think it was right to bring a baby into her violent home.”

This is one of many true stories from Janes who have called the hotline in Texas which provides legal assistance to pregnant minors. 

“Janes” on the Capitol steps. Photo by Heather Busby

Over the weekend, activists clad in hospital gowns gathered at the Texas Capitol to protest a bill that would strip a vital protection for some of the most vulnerable in Texas–pregnant minors.

Under current law, a person under the age of 18 cannot get an abortion without the consent of a parent or legal guardian. Most teens who get abortions are able to do so with consent from their parents, but for a small number–between 200 and 300–this is simply not an option. These minors are called Janes.

In 1999, judicial bypass was adopted by the state of Texas with bipartisan support, and it allows a judge to grant Janes abortion access without the notification or consent of the parent(s).

If a Jane is in danger of facing physical, sexual, or emotional abuse as a result of notifying their parent, or has no parent to give consent, judicial bypass is in place to help them.

HB 3994, authored by Rep. Geanie Morrison (R-Victoria), would alter the judicial bypass system, making abortion for minors incredibly difficult to access.

Morrison’s bill would add the following restrictions:

• Requires minors to provide “clear and convincing” evidence that obtaining consent from a parent could put them in harms way, increasing the burden of proof. The original language in the law requires only a “preponderance of evidence.”
• Requires minors to file their applications for judicial bypass with a judge in their home county, unless the county has a population under 10,000, or the county in which the abortion provider is located. The current law allows minors to file applications in any county.
• Requires doctors to ask any person seeking an abortion for a government-issued ID. The doctor can still perform the abortion without an ID, but will then be required to report it to DSHS.
• Requires doctors to notify the parents if they perform an abortion on a minor in the event of a medical emergency.
• Extends the time frame for judges to rule on a case from two days to five.
• States that if the judge fails to rule on the bypass request within those five days, that means the request is denied. The current law states that the bypass is considered approved if a judge does not rule.
• Requires county clerks to make public the names of judges who grant bypasses, removing the confidentiality of this system.

Some proponents have stated this bill will close up “loopholes” in the current law. The Texas Alliance for Life, which worked closely in drafting this legislation, claims it will protect parental rights. During debate on the House floor, Morrison argued, “It would be traumatic for a teen to have an abortion without her parents there.” Some have even gone so far as to claim these minors are purposefully going through the court system just to lie to their kind, loving parents.

Anti-abortion politicians have stooped so low in their attempt to eradicate safe, legal abortion access they have blinded themselves to the reality of who these laws were created to protect, even if it means putting teens, sometimes even children, in unconscionable situations. Legislators who drafted HB 3994 did not consult organizations like Jane’s Due Process, which provide legal representation to Janes seeking a judicial bypass.

“Janes” in the Capitol rotunda. Signs read “Age 15, Undocumented,” “Age 15, Incest,” “Age 14, Rape Survivor.” Photo by Heather Busby

One “Jane” activist explained this is exactly why the #HereforJaneTX movement was launched.

“It is time to stand up and elevate the untold stories of Janes across Texas. Each Jane is different, and every reason they need help is valid.”

She and other “Jane” activists stood in the Capitol holding signs with the ages and circumstances of real Janes who have used the current judicial bypass system.

The reasons Janes need this system are numerous. Often times these minors face severe abuse at home, or their parents may be deceased, incarcerated, or are abusing drugs and simply aren’t around. Some Janes are survivors of rape or incest, homeless, or are undocumented.

Without an effective, expeditious judicial bypass system, Janes in Texas will be left with few options and more vulnerable than ever.

To learn more about this legislation and ways to take action through this grassroots movement, visit the #HereForJaneTX website. For more information about the judicial bypass process, visit Jane’s Due Process, a non-profit which provides legal representation to pregnant minors.

Last week, the Texas Senate voted 21-10 to eliminate coverage for abortion care through insurance plans paid for through the federal health care exchange and offered through private insurance.

The bill’s author, Senator Larry Taylor (R-Friendswood), argued that its purpose is to prevent people who are against abortion from having to pay for it.

According to Sen. Taylor, women can still get abortions, “they’ll just have to come up with another means to pay for it other than having all the people across the state of Texas who buy insurance being forced to pay for something they don’t believe in or agree with.”

If abortion care is no longer available through insurance plans, it is unlikely insurance companies would offer supplemental coverage. Even if it is made available, it would be incredibly expensive, putting abortion access out of reach for those who need it most.

Sam Richardson, assistant professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, told the Dallas Morning News insurance companies would “need to price this coverage at a pretty high level because the only people that would buy it are people who think that they might want to get an abortion at some point.”

Sen. Taylor’s bill would allow insurance companies to provide abortion care only if it would save the woman’s life or “prevent substantial impairment of a major bodily function.” Risks to mental health would not be covered, and there are no exceptions for victims of rape or incest.

When Sen. Sylvia Garcia (D-Houston) proposed an amendment to make an exception and allow insurance providers to cover abortion in cases of assault, it was voted down by Senate Republicans.

“It is wrong for the Texas Legislature to take away insurance coverage for a legal medical procedure. It is particularly disgusting that anti-choice members of the Texas Senate refused to create an exception for survivors of sexual assault and incest or for families facing the tragedy of a wanted pregnancy that has gone wrong,” said Heather Busby, Executive Director of NARAL Pro-Choice Texas. “The Texas Legislature should not add to tragedy by forcing people in these circumstances to pay for abortions out of pocket.”

Sen. Taylor’s bill is set to be heard by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives this week, where it will most likely pass. The House has already passed a similar bill that prohibits insurance coverage for abortion in the federal health care exchange.

By removing abortion coverage from insurance plans, legislators are taking away one of the few existing options for Texans who need to access legal abortion care.

In 1976 Congress passed a legislative provision known as the Hyde Amendment, prohibiting the use of federal Medicaid funding for abortion. Henry Hyde, the Illinois Republican who proposed the amendment, said, “I certainly would like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion, a rich woman, a middle-class woman, or a poor woman. Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the… Medicaid bill.”

According to the ACLU, 15 states have already passed measures prohibiting abortion coverage in federal insurance plans, and 10 states ban abortion coverage in all health plans. These bills are how legislators are ensuring no one can afford and, by extension, access abortion, just as Henry Hyde envisioned.

In March, FPH covered an important fight that was brewing on the steps of the State Capitol. Our favorite Houston Senator, The Great Dan Patrick, had introduced Senate Bill 1128 which would have redefined what Texas universities could classify as history.  That same day, Texas Republican House of Representative Giovanni Capriglione introduced House Bill 1938  which outlined the same goal as SB 1128.

According to the bill(s), “A college or university receiving state support or state aid from public funds may not grant a baccalaureate degree or a lesser degree or academic certificate to any person unless the person has credit for six semester hours or its equivalent from courses providing a comprehensive survey of American history.” Translate that from white man speak and you have effectively eliminated all history courses that focus on minorities. It was not coincidence that this bill was introduced on the first day of spring break. Patrick, Capriglione, and their cronies thought that everyone would be sleeping on the job.

Fortunately for us, and all history courses everywhere, their plan did not work. Activists from all over the state came together and stood in solidarity against these bills–and their voices were heard. Thanks to activists such as Tony Diaz, one of the founders of the Librotraficante Movement, SB 1128 and HB 1938 were crushed by the masses. According to Diaz, “We formed a Texas-wide coalition that fought against HB 1938 & SB 1128, which would have discredited Ethnic Studies at Texas state colleges and universities and effectively eliminated Mexican American, African American, and Women’s Studies programs, among others.  Both bills are now dead.”

Movements such as Librotraficante have made a name for themselves fighting abusive legislation that wishes to whitewash our nation’s history. Librotraficante was born when Arizona House Bill 2281, which dismantled the Mexican-American studies programs in their schools, was passed. When the Mexican-American studies programs were eliminated, it led to the banning of multiple authors from the school libraries. Authors such as Isabel Allende, Junot  Díaz, Dagoberto Gilb and numerous others.  Tony and others in the movement responded by  “smuggling” the banned books back into Arizona and setting up “underground” libraries all over the country.

Diaz summed it up best when he said, “Capriglione and Patrick submitted these bills on the first day of Spring Break. They must not have realized that the Librotraficantes spend Spring Break defying oppression. At this time last year, we launched the Librotraficante Caravan to Smuggle Banned Books Back into Arizona, and this year we defended Ethnic Studies in our own back yard. This is a warning to all far right legislators in any State of the Union, if you attack our History, our culture, or our books, we will defy you. And we will win.”

You can read more about SB 1128 here and here

It is expensive to be born with a vagina. Tampons alone at times are a commodity (ladies, let me introduce you to your new best friend: The Diva Cup. Your “shit, i guess I’ll just use toilet paper” days are over). And tampons are just one of the many items our vagina’s demand that we sometimes can’t afford. However, i would have to say that above all the other items we need to function in our society the one closer to the top of the list is some form of birth control.

I would like to think that we have progressed past a time in which our doctors and legislators have control over our bodies, but unfortunately this is just wishful thinking. For the last five years Texas has offered The Texas Women’s Health Program (TWHP). This once great program provided free birth control, breast, cervical and STD screenings to women who otherwise could not afford them. This assault on reproductive rights was calculated and carried out through anti abortion groups like, Texas Right to Life and our Planned Parenthood hating politicians.

As if Planned Parenthood and the women who rely on them have not been marginalized enough this past legislation through budget cuts and a bullshit sonogram bill, now they are attempting to use rhetoric to kick us in the clit just one more time. Currently the TWHP is up for renewal and although this program has benefited approximately 300,000 Texas women and families over the last five years (me included, independent journalism isn’t exactly known for its health benefits), republicans are set on adjusting the language so that it will exclude Planned Parenthood from the program. 40% of the women who rely on the program received their services through Planned Parenthood. The TWHP saves an estimated $20 million in annual Medicaid spending and receives $9 in federal money for every $1 it spends on the program.  And sadly, cutting the program would lead to an estimated 20,000 more unplanned pregnancies (which logically means: more money).

To guarantee that Planned Parenthood providers cannot participate in the program, the bill includes a provision that states if the bill becomes a law and Planned Parenthood sues to overturn it, the state program would be discontinued entirely.

It is well known that Planned Parenthood does not use state or federal money to fund abortions. All Planned Parenthood abortion funding comes from private donors. Family planning clinics all over Texas were recently defunded by cutting $74 million of the $111 million administered by the state’s Department of State Health Services. These cuts affect all facilities but Planned Parenthood took the biggest hit and this is why republicans and anti abortion groups went after said funding.

Texas Right to Life’s Legislative Director John Seago recently told pro-life site LifeSiteNews.com,  “Even though these clinics are family planning clinics — so there’s not actually any abortions being provided at the clinics that are closing their doors — there’s no mistake that these are abortion-minded clinics that are sending women to abortion clinics.”

These same morons who are ecstatic about the harm they have done to women’s reproductive rights are equally zealous about an increase in state funds to the state’s Alternative to Abortion Services Program (AASP). The AASP’s budget saw a small but significant spike from $4 million to $4.15 million during our last legislation. The AASP disperses money to faith-based and largely unregulated Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPC’s).

CPC’s offer ‘mentoring’ and ‘counseling’ to women who are faced with unwanted pregnancies and usually offer no medical services. The centers have a long history of violations, as reported by the Texas Independent, “Official records show… violations ranging from fire safety to possible breaches of client privacy. During 15 percent of inspections (which were not undercover visits), subcontractors had failed to separate and label spiritual and educational materials properly.”

The truth is that even though Planned Parenthood and other family planning facilities are being forced to close their doors and limit services the real victims here are ultimately going to be low income women.

As no one needs to be reminded this spring’s political conversation was dominated by the fight over public education funding, both here in Texas and across the nation. As the story unfolded one question kept buzzing around, the one question no one was asking: “Why?” As in why pick on education funding now after all we’ve been in tight budget spots before? Why are conservatives so intent on making it impossible for schools to do their job? Why has it come to this: teachers and parents taking to the streets to keep schools open?

Admittedly at the time it was hard to see through the rhetoric. So it’s understandable that no one was really trying to figure out if there was more to the case than the”everyone has to make sacrifices” line of reasoning. However, as the year has gone on and the story has moved off the front pages, things seems to be getting worse. Schools across Texas are either trying to put together lesson plans without textbooks or preparing to sue the state, again, to force the legislature to fund education. And the only thing coming out of Austin is a desire to re-fight the decades-old battle about whether we should replace high school biology with Sunday School classes.

It didn’t take a genius to find out that the proposed cuts  to Texas’ budget were not being applied across the board, but it still didn’t answer the question of why cut school funding instead of something else. Then I saw a blog post on Forbes.com from John T. Harvey. He begins by rehashing how the state’s budget crisis was completely predictable, but fails to mention how it’s predicted to happen again; he  also fails to mention that a conservative estimate, one that doesn’t include any outside factors, shows Texas with a deficit of $10 billion in 2024. Harvey’s lack of futurism aside, his post goes on to mention an idea that is almost too disgusting to think about. Harvey writes:

“I hesitate to speculate on why those in control of the State government would so blatantly ignore the warning signs and lead us into this education disaster. Others don’t, however. They believe that it is because the Governor and key Legislators are purposely setting out to destroy public education, hoping to replace our constitutionally-mandated system with one based on private schools.”

I honestly did not believe that anyone, especially an elected official, would be so uncaring as to want to destroy our public education system. Then I remembered who I was dealing with. It seems that for over 15 years conservatives have been engaged in a behind-the-scenes attempt to destroy public education. The goals of this movement were succinctly laid out by Nobel Prize winning Libertarian economist Milton Friedman in a 1995 Cato Institute briefing paper simply entitled “Public Schools: Make them Private.” In the executive summary of the paper Friedman writes a line that has become a mantra for anti-public school crusaders everywhere: “Our elementary and secondary educational system needs to be radically restructured. Such a reconstruction can be
achieved only by privatizing a major segment of the educational system…”

Friedman’s thinking didn’t come out of a vacuum; beginning in 1966 Conservatives started putting school vouchers on ballots, and they were defeated 24 out of 25 times. As the decades went on money and influence began to flow to right wing think tanks who, as Alternet pointed out, were interested in promoting “free market fundamentalism. More specifically, their goals include privatizing social security, reducing government regulations, thwarting environmental policy, dismantling unions — and eliminating public schools.”

For much of the last 20 years the call for the elimination of public schools has only come from right wing pundits and ideologues. However, as Think Progress documented, those calls have recently found a receptive audience with a group of well heeled individual and organizational donors. Among the most influential is Amway scion Dick DeVos, who, in 2024, suggested that conservatives start referring to public schools as “government schools.” One of the biggest foundations involved in attempts to implement “systemic reforms to K-12 education” is the Wal-Mart backed Walton Family Foundation, who gave $157 million last year to organizations that promote “parental choice” in schooling.

Thanks to the power of the internet the “Get Rid of Public Schools” sentiment has spread out from a handful of think tanks and intellectuals to rank and file conservatives. Much of the opposition to public education from average conservatives comes from the belief that schools are, as one commenter on Big Government stated, “indoctrination warehouses” filled with “communists.” In the case of the famous Koch brothers, who gave school privatization national exposure with David’s 1980 Vice Presidential campaign, the red scare tactics can be traced back to their father Fred’s paranoiac belief that every level of government had been infiltrated by communists or communist sympathizers.

There are of course ideas about “getting the government out of education,” giving parents and community more control over how tax dollars are spent as well as the material taught to students. One Republic-Main Street columnist suggested that we should “De-certify the teachers’ unions, abolish the U.S. Department of Education, abolish the state education departments, grant absolute autonomy to local school boards, abolish the requirement for teacher certification, give tax breaks to parents who home-school or send their kids to private school, [and]encourage churches to set up in-house schools and courses.”

The backlash against public education hasn’t just been limited to heartland states like Texas, Wisconsin or Indiana. In June, New Jersey Governor Chis Christie jumped on a TEA Party backed idea when he announced plans to privatize all of New Jersey’s schools. Terri Adams who currently serves as the president of the Independence Hall Tea Party Association, an organization that operates in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware and is known for controlling a wealthy mid-Atlantic PAC that contributed $16,000 to endorsed candidates in 2024, told Newark Star-Ledger columnist Bob Braun that her group’s “ultimate goal is to shut down public schools and have private schools only.” Adams went on to say that she thinks public schools “should go away” because they “are hurting children.”

On the legislative side of things, the football of school privatization has been carried fairly far down field by the American Legislative Exchange Council an organization, heavily funded by the Koch brothers, composed of corporate heads and elected officials that writes and distributes bills to elected officials. Ideas that start out at ALEC meetings, the next one is August 3-6 in New Orleans, have a habit of winding up coming out of the mouths of politicians. Including a seven point proposal, that led to a 17 page rebuttal, to “reform” the University of Texas along a “market model” that would pay professors based on the number of students they teach and only fund research that doesn’t have an immediate financial return.

As John T. Harvey stated privatizing all of Texas’ schools “would mean abandoning the poor, disenfranchised, and otherwise challenged children of our State. That’s not just mean-spirited, it is un-American and undemocratic. Our system of government requires an educated citizen more than any other.”

The intersection of Westheimer and Taft is where Montrose begins. Even though the street named for the flour selling German immigrant Michael Louis Westheimer starts a few blocks to the east, the community that defines the road starts near Numbers, where Shannon Hoon from Blind Melon is said to have scored a hotshot. It’s at this intersection where, for years, an adventuresome soul could find almost anything for sale in just a few blocks. You just needed to know what to look for.

Just a few blocks north of the main thoroughfare for our town’s arts district, mixed into an area lovingly referred to as the Gayberhood, is an unassuming faded and fading bungalow. It doesn’t stand out from the dozens of others in the area; except for the young black woman in front of the house, shifting from foot to foot, scratching her arms through a faded and worn sweatshirt. Though the midnight shadows render her almost invisible to the cars driving by; to those in the know she is as clear as billboard.

A late model luxury sedan pulls up. The passenger window slides down with a whisper. An unseen voice asks “is the store open?” It takes a second for her vacant eyes to register who she’s looking at, but when she recognizes the friendly face she nods. A hand slides out the window to meet hers, an exchange is made. It’s the fourth one in an hour. And it’s upsetting Triana who works the other side of the street wearing little more than heels and fur. Triana had been on the block for months before the crew moved into the old bungalow and put the skinny girl with the dead eyes and itchy arms on the corner. Triana’s customers come here because they don’t want to be seen and the extra traffic that the new girl brings is bad for business.  Triana’s gonna have to talk to her Daddy ‘bout it and see what he can do.

A little ways away from the mini drama being caused by the problems of the free market, near where Westheimer intersects the street that gives the area its name, another type of working girl faces a different type of problem. Betty is just finishing a double shift, one she told her manager she couldn’t work. She told him she couldn’t work no more late nights cause Metro stop running and she can’t get back to Cloverleaf. She told him she got a heart condition and she can’t stand out on the street waiting for her man to come get her. She told him again and again, but he keep scheduling her over night. She wonder why he don’t schedule that pretty white girl for late night?

Over at the curve, where at least a couple of times a month someone fails to read the City’s various warning signs and puts their pretty automobile into an ugly situation, the talk is of a different variety. In between chasing away their cynicism with boilermakers and bourbon the too-cool-for-this crowd chats about the social event of the season—this year’s big music festival. Who has tickets, who needs tickets, who’s playing when and how they weren’t planning on going but dammit now they have to. Sitting, almost ignored, is the morning’s front page filled with news about the end of the shuttle program and possible plans to increase government revenue. Nowhere in the-next-day’s-canary-cage-liner is the music festival mentioned and nowhere do the stories in the paper crop up in the conversation.

The silence from both parties speaks volumes and makes some people wonder why a music festival is more relevant than a proposal to this community than the loss of a community center? But those questions are as short lived and easily forgotten as the next round of shots.

A photo from one of the many protests against the proposed education cuts

By Alex Wukman

Outside Love Elementary everything is prosaic; the sound of a Mariachi trumpet drifts east across Shepherd and down 13th Street from a used car lot dotted with US, Texas and Mexico flags. Timbergrove Little League’s White Socks practice run downs on the school baseball fields, and in the shadows cast by the booms of TV trucks a jogger stops to kick a soccer ball with a father teaching his two young sons to pass to the inside of your teammate’s feet. Inside Love Elementary things are not so pleasant.

 Parents, holding signs and wearing t-shirts proudly proclaiming how much they love Love Elementary, are crammed into the school’s cafetorium to hear why HISD is considering closing the school and sending its 400 plus students to two other schools. Since HISD announced in March that Love was one of the schools being looked at for closure rumors have been circulating and one of the more persistent is that the district wants to close the school and sell the land to a developer who turn it into townhomes. And when one parent, who doesn’t provide her name, tells the HISD representative this he assures her that the district has no interest in selling the land.

 “We simply are here to talk about consolidation because of declining enrollment,” says the HISD representative. The parent, a fiery 5’2” Latina bubbling over with righteous anger, has no patience for bearucratic reasoning. “You’re lying,” she says, “there are plenty of students coming to this school.” As the meeting continues the anger and frustration from the crowd never ebbs. Community members and parents provide a litany of reasons why Love should be spared the ax. They cite the school’s improving test scores, the incredibly active PTO, the informal surveys that show the amount of students from the Heights entering kindergarten is expected to triple within in the next four years; but all of it seems to fall on deaf ears.

 Many of the parents dispute the demographic data that HISD’s highly paid consulting firm Magellan has provided the district; data that predicts Love will have a decreasing enrollment. Faculty and staff, their HISD identification badges obscured by “I heart Love” t-shirts, raise their voices as they take the mic and demand that the district make sacrifices in other areas. “We don’t need cuts to schools that are working. The sacrifices need to come from unproven experimental programs,” says one teacher.

 For months HISD has been plagued with concerns about the Apollo 20 program, which requires students to come to start the school year a week earlier and stay an hour later every day, provides math tutoring for sixth and ninth graders at the participating schools and gives students who are considered below grade level an extra math or reading class every day.  Apollo 20 has been the pet project of HISD’s new Superintendent Terry Grier.

 Grier, who is in the second year of a three year contract, has repeatedly promised HISD trustees and parents that the $20 million price tag for Apollo 20 will not be paid out of the district’s general fund, and most of the money has come from Federal grants and private donations. However, in June 2024 word leaked out that when HISD voted to renogiate a contract with Community Education Partners, an organization that provides academic and behavior improvement programs for middle and high school students, the district decided to lower the payment to CEP by $4.5 million and transfer some of that money to Apollo 20.

 The district saw it as simply transferring funds from one outside vendor to another. However, HISD volunteers and parents think that the money spent, and raised, by the district on programs like Apollo 20 could have been used to help offset the district’s $171 million budget shortfall. Even the fact that most of the money for Apollo 20 is coming from organizations like the Fondren Foundation, who recently agreed to provide $750,000 to HISD over three years to support the program, doesn’t sit well with some parents.

  “Instead of saying ‘Here’s this baby of mine, here’s what we need for it’ why can’t they say ‘Here’s what we need district wide,’” said Bronwyn Lauder, president of Love Elementary’s PTO. The millions that HISD has to cut from spending has helped push education spending to the forefront of most state and local media. And with good reason, HISD has announced that they are eliminating over 1,000 jobs and are looking at closing 17 schools to try and balance the budget.

 Among the 1,000 jobs lost are 277 positions at HISD’s administration building, which district representatives like to use to show that the pain is being felt all around. However, parents don’t think that the district is being completely honest about the front office cuts.  “I’m waiting on an open records request to see how many of those 277 are unstaffed or unfunded positions,” said Lauder. Even if the district is eliminating front office positions without actually eliminating personnel it’s only a short term solution.

 “It’s not at all hard to look in the crystal ball and see that we’ll be in the same place in 2024,” said Houston political blogger Charles Kuffner. Kuffner, who writes extensively on the budget shortfalls of governmental agencies throughout Texas, explained that HISD’s budget problem is just a localized symptom of the budget crisis being felt throughout the state. The problem starts with the proposed cuts to State education spending, which in the Texas House of Representatives is $8 billion and in the Texas Senate $4 billion. Then in reverse Reagnomics fashion the cuts trickle down to school districts across the state.

 As Kuffner explains, “all along HISD was planning a budget based on cuts to public education.” It’s just the size of the cuts that worries the district. HISD Trustee Harvin Moore explained that the House budget amounts to spending cuts of nearly $900 per student, or $20,000 less per classroom, which is a cut too severe for even HISD. At a recent HISD board meeting Trustee Paula Harris told the assembled students, teachers and parents that the district “can’t take an $800 per student cut. We’ve already cut $275 [in per student funding] and that’s been devastating to our smaller schools.”

 Like almost every district across the state HISD has been considering its options to try and find ways to minimize the amount of layoffs; one of the options that has been promoted by Governor Rick Perry has been school districts using reserve capital, or rainy day funds, to make up their budget shortfalls.  However, school districts have severe reservations about going into their savings accounts.

 “Unlike the state [districts] can’t easily transfer money out of the rainy day fund. This is a onetime thing and many districts are rightfully concerned that they’ll be in the same place in two years,” said Kuffner. He went on to describe the much heralded repeal of the Doggett Amendment, which prevented Texas from replacing state education dollars with federal money, as a stop gap measure. Named after Texas Democratic Congressman Lloyd Doggett the spending provision was put into place after the 2024 Texas Legislative session when lawmakers took stimulus bill money intended to supplement education spending and swapped it for state education dollars.

 As part of the recent budget showdown in Washington, a showdown that narrowly averted the first government closure since 1996, the Doggett Amendment was repealed; this allowed the Texas Legislature to put $830 million of federal money into the state’s education budget. The repeal of the Doggett Amendment didn’t sit well with some HISD board members. “It’s good for Texas to get federal money, but the Legislature has gone out of their way to make an elective choice not to fund education and that’s frustrating for those of us in education,” said Moore.  

 As HISD has continued trying to figure out which teachers to layoff and which schools to close, they have ignored one of the few options the district has for raising money, mostly because the people on the school board consider it political suicide. HISD Trustee Carol Galloway raised the issue by saying that “nobody on the board wants to talk about” raising taxes. Kuffner framed the reluctance of the district’s elected leadership to consider a tax increase as an abject lesson in realpolitik.

 “Even if this is the Legislature’s and Governor’s fault, the trustees still have to run for re-election,” said Kuffner.  The lack of political will to raise taxes for education funding is nothing new; it’s common knowledge in education circles that the straight line of the state’s budget crisis can be drawn right through the recession and falling sales tax revenue to tax cuts that went into effect in 2024. The ’06 tax cuts were part of Governor Perry and the Legislature’s plan to “lessen the burden on homeowners;” so lawmakers passed legislation that sounds good on paper and helps win elections. They voted to reduce property taxes by $14 billion every two years, what they didn’t tell voters was that the reduction would mean that the State would only be raising $9 billion.

 As the Fort Worth Star-Telegram stated in February 2024 “In other words, the Legislature committed $5 billion every two years to holding down property taxes instead of spending that money on education, public safety or other priorities.” The ’06 budget cuts have become famous across the state for creating what Kuffner terms a “structural deficit.” To put it another way, the 2024 tax cuts mean that the state is going to be perpetually facing budget shortfalls every two years and drastic spending cuts every budget by school districts, law enforcement and other governmental entities will be the new normal.

 And the fact that this could be the new normal is something that worries Lauder and the other parents standing beneath the jungle mural in Love Elementary’s cafetorium. In a voice painted with the faded hues of frustration and exhaustion Lauder describes how schools serve as something more than a place where children go for eight hours a day. She lays out how schools serve as a third space, somewhere beside home and work, and because of their non-religious and apolitical nature serve as an inclusive meeting place for people from backgrounds that may not feel welcomed at a holy site.

 “Schools are the perfect gathering place to get together and make decisions about impacting the world around us,” said Lauder. It just remains to be seen whether or not the State Legislature values the roles schools play in their communities; some on the HISD board aren’t so sure that those elected to serve in Austin care about education. “At least in the [Texas] House of Representatives the voice of parents and teachers has not been heard,” said HISD trustee Harvin Moore.

Imagine this scenario, if you can: it’s 10:30 at night and you’re walking to a store for whatever reason. A cop pulls up and flashes his lights. Like a good boy or girl you stop and 5-0 rolls on up and demands your name. Now, since you weren’t doing anything but minding your own business you don’t particularly feel the need to tell the po-po who you are; so you give the cop some variation of “get lost.”  Next thing you know you are arrested, charged with a Class C misdemeanor for failing to identify yourself and then, because of overcrowding, you’re carted off to a tent city to await your day in court.

Sadly if two bills that have been presented in the Texas Legislature pass the above scenario won’t be fiction, and worst of all is that the fact that these bills were even filed isn’t that surprising. In the ongoing race to the bottom that Texas entered into with Arizona this year lawmakers have already passed a voter ID bill that is guaranteed to do nothing but disenfranchise thousands of Hispanic immigrants, proposed bills that would make it a felony to hire an illegal immigrant except as your maid and dozens of other bills that seek to do everything from making it impossible for illegal immigrants to get probation or indigent health care.

Now on top of all that our enlightened elected representatives want to make it an arrestable offense for failing to tell a cop who you are, even if he or she has no reason to ask and then they want to allow County Sheriff’s to house inmates in tent cities in the middle of Texas summers.

I’ll just leave this here as a message to the assclowns in Austin: