Austin ISD keeps redrawing attendance zones and closing schools while enrollment drops. Are these decisions about kids or just about balancing a broken budget?
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Add your commentI teach in AISD. The cuts are real. The morale is real. And watching community members fight over school zones while the district slowly hollows out is deeply demoralizing for everyone in the building.
my daughter made best friends at her elementary school over three years. they are now at different schools due to rezoning. she cried for a week. tell me again how this is about children
My kids' school lost its librarian, its art teacher, and its campus aide in the same year and the district is surprised enrollment keeps dropping. The cause and effect runs both directions.
School closures in lower-income neighborhoods always get approved first. This has happened in Austin multiple times. We should say that plainly and not pretend it's just a budget neutral exercise.
We bought our house specifically in this attendance zone. We did our research. We made financial decisions based on it. And now they're moving the line 4 blocks west. I'm not just upset I'm furious.
anyone who thinks rezoning is about 'the kids' and not about real estate values and neighborhood politics has not been to one of these community meetings
I support rezoning if it genuinely integrates schools economically. But let's be honest: the moment affluent parents realize that's what's actually happening, the lawsuits start. Watch.
every time AISD has one of these rezoning town halls the same 40 people show up and scream and then nothing changes and then something changes anyway. the public comment process is theater
The families who are angriest about rezoning are usually the ones whose kids are moving FROM a high-resource campus TO a less-resourced one. And I say this as someone in that exact position: maybe that discomfort is pointing at a real equity problem in the district.
our kids walked to school every day for 4 years and now theyre being reassigned to a school 3.2 miles away with no bus. how is that better for anyone
I've been on the AISD PTA for 6 years and these decisions are genuinely hard with no good options. Everyone wants to save their school and nobody wants to raise taxes. You can't have both.
Texas public school funding formula is the actual villain here. AISD is making bad choices under impossible constraints created by the Legislature. Yell at Austin, Texas, not Austin the city.
enrollment in AISD is down because families are leaving for charter schools and private schools and other districts. at some point the district has to respond to reality even if the solutions are painful
Charter schools are not the answer. They've been absorbing AISD enrollment for a decade and public schools are worse, not better. The experiment has results. Read them.
We pulled our kids and put them in Eanes ISD after we moved like two miles west and suddenly we're zoned differently. Night and day difference in resources. It's not complicated — the funding model is broken.
Genuinely asking: does any city in America have a functioning public school funding model right now? Because it seems like this is everywhere.
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