Stand Up for Katy ISD

More culture war bogus distractions while our state neglects addressing the real issues and needs in public education.

Teachers! You matter! ALL teachers deserve a voice in our district.

Teacher turnover rates had been holding steady around 11-12% and then suddenly rose to nearly 17% in the 2022-2023 school year. Our newer board members took over just as this data would’ve been given to our district. Did they do anything then? Did they even acknowledge it?

One year ago, our board majority suddenly started caring but only on THEIR terms.

How can our school board address teacher retention and teacher planning time when they refuse to create a district-wide survey? Do you only ask the best teacher and the most unhappy teacher but ignore all the others? Do you only ask your friends? When you use a small sampling, you ignore all the nuances of our district and of public schools in general. What about the special education teacher? The ELA teacher with 150 essays to grade? The ESL teacher? The dozens of other types of teachers, their demographics, and the demographics of the students they serve…

This also ignores the expertise and management skills of our associate superintendents and principals. They are the ones who should be addressing the one to two teachers and fixing those problems, not a board member who was a teacher 20 years ago for only a short time, or the board members who have never worked in education at all.

This is THE reason why we are getting weird bandaid fixes like an odd stipend at 5-year marks. Had they done a district wide survey, they may have realized that using that money to get lunchroom monitors in the first place would have helped all teachers and improved job satisfaction across the whole district in a fiscally responsible way.

Bottom line, our board majority only started caring about teachers and their job satisfaction when they realized it would serve them politically. They saw how much Dawn and Rebecca won their elections last year primarily due to teacher and staff support. Only then, did we start hearing about teachers and ideas for helping them despite the overwhelming data that teachers have been unhappy for a few years now.

We need the divisive partisan politics OUT of our boardroom.

We need a board that addresses the glaring problems in our district.

We need a board that respects the expertise of teachers and staff.