Eight Feet Deep

For­get cut­ting teacher pay raises or even lay­ing off teach­ers when the bot­tom line comes call­ing. Utah State Sen. Chris But­tars, a Repub­li­can, sees school dis­tricts rid­ding them­selves of buses and the 12th grade.

In less des­per­ate times such an idea may seem nutty. But with an eco­nomic crunch from a hard-hitting reces­sion, peo­ple tend to lis­ten to just about any idea that might save money. So But­tars believes a dis­ap­pear­ing act for school buses and a pesky 12th year or school would net that state, which wants to cut edu­ca­tion fund­ing by 5 per­cent, about $300 mil­lion a year.

Are such cuts ridicu­lous? I couldn’t tell you. I’m sure a case can be made either way. Maybe yes, maybe no. I can only give you my per­sonal tes­ti­mony which can either be used as food for thought, or fed to the dog under the table.

First, let’s start with kinder­garten. I never went to kinder­garten. Texas school laws require that kids who turn 6 years old as of Sept. 1 must attend the first grade. I turned 6 almost two months later than that date.

I remem­ber Momma took me to some kind of ori­en­ta­tion for par­ents and kids enter­ing ele­men­tary school. It was “ele­men­tary” school then but I don’t think it was too far from those days when begin­ning grades were called “gram­mar school.” This was in 1961. Wow, it’s hard to believe that was almost 50 years ago. Of course, there was no Inter­net back then. There was barely tele­vi­sion where I lived some 60 to 75 miles from the area’s TV sta­tions, although we received them with a tall antenna on the old house.

At that gath­er­ing my Momma was informed that I was too young to attend school, although I could attend kinder­garten. The pref­ace above is that it is dif­fi­cult for me to believe that my mother didn’t know that I was too young. After all, she was a bril­liant woman who worked for county gov­ern­ment. But maybe she wasn’t aware of that because she had been busy rais­ing five boys and the fact that she did work. I also don’t know why my par­ents didn’t opt to send me to kinder­garten. I don’t remem­ber, though, being upset over attending.

Dur­ing my senior year I took two classes that — even though they may have not been all that cru­cial — turned out to be the most impor­tant classes I had in high school. One was Eng­lish com­po­si­tion with Miss Miller. The other was civics with Mr. Davis, our school super­in­ten­dent and who had hired my mother by that time as school tax assessor.

Prior to my senior year the prac­tice ended allow­ing those in the 12th grade “study halls” or basi­cally what were free peri­ods for those stu­dent not need­ing more cred­its to grad­u­ate. What luck! I was assigned two classes not of my choos­ing. One was a first period phys­i­cal edu­ca­tion course and the other was Alge­bra II.

For­tu­nately, I was put into what was essen­tially a co-ed P.E. class. Coach Sim­mons, our teacher, had a girls’ class dur­ing that period and there were about five boys includ­ing myself who were assigned because we had nowhere else to go. Coach had his hands full with the girls so the guys were left to roam the area of the foot­ball and P.E. field or field house. We would lift weights if we wanted to or would occa­sion­ally play soft­ball with the girls if we chose. It wasn’t very pro­duc­tive edu­ca­tion­ally, but it was okay by me.

The advanced alge­bra class, on the other hand, really brought out the rebel in me. I wasn’t at all pleased we could no longer have a free period so I just took a book into that class each day and read while class took place. I had made all this known to the teacher. I sup­pose she really couldn’t do any­thing since the class wasn’t required although I had to attend it. At the end of the year the teacher made a deal with me. If I passed the final I would get a “D,” which was (barely) pass­ing. I think I squeaked by with a D and got a D in the course. Look­ing back, I don’t guess it is some­thing to be proud of but also I am not par­tic­u­larly ashamed of it either.

My other classes that year included “home­room,” which was basi­cally a social hour to gab with my friends. I also had year­book staff, which was fun. My final class was gen­eral busi­ness. I don’t think it was of great ben­e­fit even though I did the work and passed. How­ever, it was a fun class because Mr. Weaver was a cool guy who let us joke around.

Eng­lish com­po­si­tion and civics turned out to be essen­tial classes in my career as a jour­nal­ist as well as dur­ing my stints as a gov­ern­ment employee. Nei­ther class had been required. The two classes which I was made to attend but were not essen­tial for my grad­u­a­tion except for being made to attend, as was the case with the rest of my senior year at school, which served only in improv­ing my social skills.

I won’t say my senior year was worth­less because it cer­tainly wasn’t. It was the best year I had in all 12 years of school. That is because of the two courses which turned out as ben­e­fi­cial as well as the social aspect. I have to add, that social­iza­tion in school can be of tremen­dous impor­tance to those stu­dents such as I who tended to be rather timid dur­ing my younger school years. (I still tend to be some­what intro­spec­tive, although much of it is because cer­tain types of peo­ple now just tend to piss me off! Call it my cur­mud­geon phase.)

Had I chose a dif­fer­ent path in life, say in sci­ence, my senior year and per­haps even the three other years in high school would not have been much of a help. It would even have been largely a waste of time inso­far as receiv­ing an edu­ca­tion to pre­pare me for col­lege and a career. After four years in the Navy and a year of just work­ing I began the four years it took me to get a bachelor’s degree. I ended up with a 2.8 grade aver­age over all despite half of all my semes­ters were spent on the Dean’s List with a 3.0 or bet­ter. That’s not summa type but not bad for both work­ing and attend­ing col­lege full time.

A 12th year of school was added in Texas only in the 1940s. Com­pul­sory edu­ca­tion laws today are still more aimed at age rather than grade, unless you hap­pen to be enrolled. Even now kids can grad­u­ate early. But the whole argu­ment of what a 12th grade is worth is much more than just aca­d­e­mics alone. This is espe­cially so if you look at extracur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties and aspects such as the life of par­ents who these days are more likely to both work.

As for cut­ting school buses, that is even more dis­tant a thought for me than elim­i­nat­ing the 12th grade. Many schools already con­tract bus ser­vices, thus elim­i­nat­ing equip­ment and costs for dri­vers and mechan­ics. Get­ting rid of buses alto­gether though, I don’t know.

If my voice were impor­tant to this debate about to hap­pen in Utah over the 12th grade, I would have to say that maybe a 12th grade need not be manda­tory. Per­haps the state could just let the par­ents decide whether their kids should attend a 12th grade  if the stu­dent has com­pleted enough cred­its to grad­u­ate in the 11th grade. It might not save nearly as much money although it might cause a few dol­lars to be saved. Then again, I don’t live in Utah, I live in Texas. And I am quite happy about that.

 The non-profit news site Texas Tri­bune appar­ently has unleashed a data-based inves­ti­ga­tion that has a lot of jaws flap­ping in the Lone Star State.

 Headed by for­mer Texas Monthly editor-in-everything, New Yorker Evan Smith, the Tri­bune has an easy-to-use data grab­ber on which you can find the salaries of your local school super­in­ten­dent or any in the rest of Texas. Hats off to the Tribune’s Matt Stiles and Brian Thevenot for an enlight­en­ing report.

 The infor­ma­tion unleashed espe­cially has many a neck red­den­ing down here in Beau­mont where it is lit­tle or no sur­prise that our some­times con­tro­ver­sial Beau­mont ISD Super­in­ten­dent Dr. Car­roll Thomas is the state’s high­est paid school executive.

 Thomas makes a very com­fort­able $324,212 per year. I would say what is most inter­est­ing about his salary is that it is earned for over­see­ing a dis­trict with 13,309 stu­dents.  The top four highest-paid supes fol­low­ing Thomas all have salaries in the 300 grand range. They over­see Fort Worth ISD (79,285 enroll­ment), Dal­las ISD (157,352), Alief (45,230), and Hous­ton (200,225 students).

 It seems much is made from other media using the Tri­bune’s infor­ma­tion of “per-student” fig­ures, the amount of dol­lars in salary per stu­dent, of each school leader. Maybe I am miss­ing it, but I have yet to find much real sig­nif­i­cance in those fig­ures other than in the “Gee Whiz” fac­tor. The fact is a num­ber of schools with smaller enroll­ments some­times pay fairly hand­some salaries to super­in­ten­dents which would tend to skew the per-student num­ber. Super­in­ten­dent Fer­nando Castillo runs the Pro­greso ISD in the Rio Grande Valley’s Hidalgo County. The dis­trict has an enroll­ment of  2, 150 and Fer­nando draws a salary of $208,566. Thus, Castillo has a $97-per stu­dent fig­ure while Daniel King who is super­in­ten­dent of Pharr-San Juan-Alamo ISD in the same county “earns” $7 per stu­dent with his enroll­ment of 30,618.

 A total of 214 super­in­ten­dents who run schools rang­ing from 500–2,500 stu­dents are paid salaries rang­ing from the high $99,000s to more than $46,000. Those are actu­ally some of the lower paid supes in the state.

 While some of the salaries seem out of whack, espe­cially when look­ing at enroll­ment, they also have to be seen in con­text. Texas has what I con­sider to be an inequitable school aca­d­e­mic grad­ing sys­tem. On the other hand, there are a lot of things I would do dif­fer­ent if I was the King of Texas.

 Socioe­co­nom­ics also have to be fig­ured into a rat­ing a school in the state’s “account­abil­ity sys­tem.” Thus, a superintendent’s abil­ity in ensur­ing that a school has a tol­er­a­ble rat­ing many times has to be seen through the lens of the racial and eco­nomic make up of a district’s stu­dents. For instance, Beaumont’s Thomas heads a school with a major­ity minor­ity pop­u­la­tion that has improved its grade from “Aca­d­e­m­i­cally Accept­able” to “Rec­og­nized.” The lat­ter is the sec­ond high­est of six account­abil­ity rat­ings the state pulled out of its a** uses.

 Of course, Thomas has detrac­tors who accuse him of every­thing from crony­ism to worse.

 I should be more involved and aware of our local school sys­tem. But I have no kids in school. I am more wor­ried about the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, city gov­ern­ment and state gov­ern­ment, in that order. So I will leave it to those who sup­port Thomas, racists who hate him because he is black, or those who have any­where from a mod­icum of sense to bril­liance who do not think Thomas is doing a good job but aren’t likely to lynch him.

 This I will say. There are a whole group of pro­fes­sions with peo­ple who make very tidy sums of money because they have dif­fi­cult jobs that are very often looked at by the pub­lic with a keen eye and scru­ti­nized by an elected board of offi­cials of whom  every deci­sion is a polit­i­cal one. This group include school superintendents, high school foot­ball coaches (I sus­pect some in Texas make more money than super­in­ten­dents), city man­agers and police and fire chiefs in urban areas.

 Is Car­roll Thomas worth the sum of money he is paid and which makes him the high­est paid school chief in Texas? I don’t know. I think, hon­estly, the only way to say is to look at his record once he is replaced. But I know I wouldn’t want his job. I wouldn’t want the job of Beau­mont West Brook head coach Craig Stump. Nor would I want the jobs of the Beau­mont fire chief Anne Huff and police chief Frank Cof­fin. I wouldn’t mind if Beaumont’s city man­ager got a better-paying job else­where. But that’s another story for another time.