How Gov. Abbott's voucher plan would wallop rural schools (Opinion)
Jerry Lara, Staff / San Antonio Express-NewsMARATHON – One afternoon not long after Laura and I bought The Wee House, our home away from home in this small, unincorporated community west of the Pecos, I decided to go run the bleachers at the high school football field a block up the street.
Money is a perennial problem. With a total K-12 enrollment of 53 in the school year that just ended, consolidation with nearby Alpine or Fort Stockton is always a possibility. If that happened, though — if the stately rust-colored brick high school and the low-slung elementary school across the street were left to the great horned owls — Marathon would not be Marathon.
Because Texas public schools get by on a complicated system of local tax revenue and state dollars — with state money distributed on a per-student basis — private-school vouchers are a threat to already precarious districts such as Marathon’s. If local students take their vouchers and leave, those districts would lose funds. Despite Abbott’s and Patrick’s assurances, one way or another, state funds could be diverted to cover private and home-schooling expenses.
Alpine is 30 miles west of Marathon. Home to Sul Ross State University, the attractive little town is much larger than Marathon, but not so big that it manages to avoid lawmaker neglect.
In Fort Davis, 23 miles north of Alpine, school superintendent Graydon Hicks III, like a prophet crying in the Big Bend wilderness, warns that the public school situation is even more dire than most Texans realize. Fort Davis ISD — like Alpine — can only pay its teachers the state minimum starting salary. As Hicks wrote inlast fall, Fort Davis High School, built in 1929, has no cafeteria. The school has no art teacher, no librarian. Hicks himself mows the football field.
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