Texans love their football. They love spending around $71 million on high school football stadiums. Katy, Texas has been working on the most expensive stadium in the U.S. for some time now and things are only going to be super awesome when it opens next year. Originally slated to be around $61 million, an additional $9 million was quietly added recently. The good news is that that goddamn stadium is getting built! Bad news is that the school district has a crazy overcrowding problem and are not sure where they are going to get the money to build new elementary schools, says Superintendent Lance Hindt.
Overcrowding is a problem that is systemic and something that was known at the time board members used $12 million in surplus money from previous bonds to upgrade the stadium and to fix mistakes made during the planning process. The district overlooked very basic elements of the construction project. It did not sufficiently plan for road improvement to properly address additional traffic. It even had to add nearly $1 million to the project to clear the property before construction could begin.
Overcrowding problems don’t end with Randolph Elementary School.
“If we don’t do something with Cross Creek Ranch Elementary School we’ll have the potential of having one of the largest elementary schools in the history of Katy ISD,” said Hindt at Monday night’s board meeting.
Before we jump all over Hindt, he was not there when the school board decided to play with the lives of Katy, Texas children as if this were a game of Sim City. But, he’s the superintendent now and is probably pretty annoyed that everyone is asking him where the money is going to come from. Realistically it’ll come from more bonds being voted on by the public. The district’s COO Thomas Gunnell estimates that they need at least four more elementary schools, two junior high schools and one high school to deal with the student overcrowding problem. Another board member, the only board member not to vote on the stadiums recently elected George Scott, became elected in part because of the school board’s growing lack of transparency and subsequent idiotic handling of the football stadium.
Removing the public comments video from the Katy ISD website was done in a simultaneous two-step process. First, the board said it was moving public comments from its regular monthly meeting to its monthly work-study meeting, touting it as a way to improve communication with the public. Then, without public notice, the district stopped posting the work-study meeting videos on its website. A district spokesperson said it was done to save about $4,000 per year. The school district claims Texas law only requires it to post the regular monthly meeting, not the work-study meeting. Many people, including former board members Mary McGarr and Bill Proctor, disagree. They say the district is required to post video of the work-study meetings because votes are taken on action items at those meetings. They say if the board is taking votes at a meeting, then the district is required to post videos of the meeting even if they claim it’s just a work-study session.
Scott is right about the board’s waste of money but from what I can see his ideas on education are more of the same pointless conservative (and neo liberal) “accountability-based” campaigns. His background is in statistics and he’s spent most of his criticism on the handling of finances in Katy’s school system as opposed to offering up meaningful educational ideas.
Scott spent years as a senior researcher and president for a nonprofit public policy firm and served on the board of managers of the Harris County Hospital District. He ran for a seat on the Katy ISD board in 1986 but lost. Scott once talked of creating a "shadow board" to critique the Katy ISD board and district, with its main focus being to "use public data to take aim at the district's use of high-stakes testing." But it never came to pass due to a lack of funds.
That being said, the Katy district seems hellbent on changing the faces on their board but not the ideas. Katy’s school district is growing and changing and how awesome their football stadium will be a footnote in the history of whether or not they are able to produce critical thinkers in the coming years.