ROBERT LEE, Texas — After a bus motive force referred to as in in poor health one fresh afternoon, Robert Lee Independent School District Superintendent Aaron Hood crammed in for her. Slipping in the back of the wheel in a button-up blouse and tie, he rumbled down nation roads, previous ranches and wind farms to commute a couple of dozen scholars house on this tiny West Texas city.
Out right here, the place livestock outnumber kids 20 to 1, no person is hollering about important race principle in textbooks or pornography in the library. But the ones battles raging 250 miles away in the state capital and in far-away suburbs have galvanized a political motion that Hood fears may deal a devastating blow to rural school districts like his.
Backed by means of a surge of marketing campaign spending from far-right Christian megadonors, Republicans in Texas and national are pushing law that will siphon cash from public schooling beneath the banner of “parents’ rights.” These plans, recurrently referred to as vouchers, would give folks the cash the state would have spent instructing their kids in public colleges — between $8,000 and $10,000 in step with kid in step with 12 months in Texas — and make allowance them to put it towards homeschooling bills, private school tuition or school financial savings accounts.
Officials in communities like Robert Lee, which has a inhabitants of about 1,000, warn those insurance policies will chip away at already razor-thin public school budgets. With handiest 250 scholars — about 18 kids in step with grade — even a slight drop in enrollment and investment can drive rural colleges like Robert Lee to make onerous selections, Hood mentioned.
“We don’t have the same economy of scale as larger districts,” he mentioned, which is one reason why he got a industrial motive force’s license to serve instead bus motive force. “If we lose five or 10 students, that’s a teacher salary. But we can’t afford to have one less teacher, so now we’re cutting academic programs, we’re cutting sports, we’re cutting the things that this community relies on.”
As president of the Texas Association of Rural Schools, a number of 362 public school districts which might be united of their opposition to vouchers, Hood and his fellow small-town superintendents were making an attempt to sound an alarm in Austin. They see the state GOP’s push for what advocates name “school choice” or “education freedom” as a betrayal of the birthday celebration’s rural base in prefer of rich marketing campaign donors.
In a far off county the place 9 in 10 citizens forged ballots for then-President Donald Trump in 2020, Hood and different school leaders concern that many native households received’t listen to the debate till it’s too past due.
“Nobody opposes school choice, but that’s not really what we’re talking about,” Hood mentioned. “It’s all in how you ask the question. If you ask people in this community if they support sending their tax dollars to private schools with no accountability and no standards, they’re going to tell you they’re against that.”
Gov. Greg Abbott has made schooling freedom an emergency precedence on this legislative consultation, a reversal from previous years when he appeared to toe the line between the pursuits of pro-voucher activists and the issues of rural constituents.
Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesman for Abbott, mentioned in an e mail that school choice systems “bridge the partisan divide” and are supported by means of “voters across rural Texas.” He pointed to a January survey carried out by means of the University of Houston Hobby School of Public Affairs that discovered a majority of Texans — together with 62% of the ones dwelling in rural counties — supported giving folks tax-funded vouchers to ship their kids to private colleges.
To rally improve for the motive, Abbott has staged a chain of occasions along leaders from the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an influential conservative assume tank that has spent years fighting to finish “the government monopoly in public education.”
Despite its branding as a excursion to spotlight improve for school choice in rural Texas, all of the governor’s stops were held at private Christian colleges in mid-size towns, including Amarillo, a West Texas metro with a inhabitants kind of the length of Charleston, West Virginia.
Wes Washam, Robert Lee’s school board president, chuckled when he heard about the match.
“Amarillo is not rural,” he mentioned, noting that during Robert Lee, the closest private school is greater than 30 miles away. “We’re kind of getting left out of the conversation.”
Spending cash, successful votes
For a few years, an not likely coalition of rural Republican lawmakers and concrete Democrats shaped a wall in opposition to private school vouchers in the Texas Legislature. But political spending by means of conservative Christian megadonors has helped chip away at opposition inside of the Texas GOP — together with in the state Senate district that represents Robert Lee.
Until this 12 months, Senate District 31 had lengthy been held by means of Republican Kel Seliger, whose steadfast opposition to vouchers helped flip him right into a goal from ultraconservative political motion committees like Defend Texas Liberty and the now-defunct Empower Texans. Both PACs drew the overwhelming majority in their investment from the households of Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, a couple of billionaire oil and fracking magnates who’ve expressed the view that govt and schooling must be guided by biblical values.
“They set out to make an example of me,” Seliger mentioned.
The PACs spent thousands and thousands of greenbacks over the previous decade backing the GOP number one fighters of Seliger and different average Republicans, ousting a handful of legislators and successful concessions from others. Seliger all the time controlled to hang on to his seat — till ultimate 12 months, simply as the backlash in opposition to school range systems was once starting to supercharge the national motion for private school vouchers.
Ahead of what would were Seliger’s 2022 re-election marketing campaign, a number of far-right donors threw their improve in the back of his newest number one challenger, Kevin Sparks, a Midland oilman who’d served on the board of the pro-voucher Texas Public Policy Foundation. Sparks additionally sits on the board of trustees at Midland Classical Academy, a private Christian school based by means of Dunn, whose circle of relatives donated $200,000 to Sparks’ marketing campaign. Later, Trump jumped into the race, endorsing Sparks and calling Seliger a RINO — Republican in Name Only.
NBC News asked interviews with Sparks, Wilks and Dunn, however they declined or didn’t reply.
After twenty years in the Legislature — dealing with an uphill re-election combat and having concluded that the Texas Republican Party had “really gone off the rails” — Seliger determined to retire.
“Now was a good time to leave,” he mentioned, “because I could leave on my own terms.”
Sparks, who simply received the Republican number one and ran unopposed in the basic election, was once sworn in to Seliger’s former seat in January, flipping it in prefer of school choice. The freshman senator’s district comprises 91 public school programs stretching from the Texas panhandle to the oil-rich Permian Basin; all however six of them are small rural districts with out a native private school choices, an NBC News research discovered.
The pursuits of public colleges in the ones communities, Seliger argued, are now not totally represented in the Texas Senate.
“These powerful donors figured out they could just buy the campaigns,” he mentioned. “Those people essentially own those seats now, and they’re going to get what they want out of them.”
Lobbying for rural improve
On his private Christian school street excursion, Abbott has pitched school choice as some way of empowering folks to offer protection to their kids from a “woke agenda” he says is being driven by means of some public school educators.
Such allegations sound fanciful to many in Robert Lee, the place each the city and the school district are unapologetically named in honor of the well-known Confederate basic’s army carrier in Texas prior to the Civil War.
The greatest political controversy Hood has handled in recent times has been over the strictness of the get dressed code. “When you’ve got all of your students ages 5 through 18 in one building,” he mentioned, “you sort of have to be conservative.”
And but, in accordance to Hood and different rural school officers, conservative districts like Robert Lee stand to undergo the maximum critical penalties beneath the Republican plans.
Because Texas public colleges are funded with a mixture of native tax earnings and state bucks — with state cash dispensed on a per-student foundation — rural districts may see their investment minimize in two tactics: both on account of shedding native scholars without delay to vouchers, or on account of the total pot of state price range being diluted to quilt private and homeschooling bills of scholars in far-away towns and suburbs, leaving much less per-student investment for each district.
“Imagine making that pitch to a rural voter,” Hood mentioned. “You’re going to take our tax money and give it to a parent in the Dallas suburbs so their child can go to an expensive private school? Absolutely not.”
Republican leaders have tried to head off the ones criticisms. Under Senate Bill 8, the main school choice invoice earlier than the Legislature, folks who pull their kids out of public school could be eligible to obtain $8,000 in step with kid every 12 months in an schooling financial savings account. To offset that investment loss, districts with fewer than 20,000 scholars would obtain $10,000 a 12 months from the state to make up for every pupil they lose due to the program — however just for the first two years after the kid disenrolled. And the financial savings accounts could be to be had handiest to scholars lately attending public colleges and youngsters getting into kindergarten, no longer the ones already in private colleges.
The invoice, titled The Texas Parental Bill of Rights, additionally offers folks extra oversight of public school curriculum whilst prohibiting colleges from offering instruction “regarding sexual orientation or gender identity” in any respect grade ranges.
In a observation, the invoice’s Republican writer, state Sen. Brandon Creighton, framed the law as a compromise between “parents, educators, employers and students.”
But Michael Lee, the government director of the Texas Association of Rural Schools, mentioned the concessions didn’t trade his group’s place on vouchers. The brief $10,000 bills to small districts and bounds on pupil eligibility would simply extend, no longer save you, cuts to rural colleges, he mentioned.
“We continue to encourage legislators who represent our rural school districts to vote in the best interest of their constituents,” Lee mentioned.
‘Not asking for a handout’
A couple of days after selecting up the direction for the in poor health bus motive force, Hood was once in the press field overlooking the Robert Lee Steers athletic complicated at the get started of a center school observe meet.
PA announcer: yet another activity that infrequently falls to the superintendent of a small-town school.
Families and student-athletes had come to Robert Lee from 8 different rural school districts, a few of them greater than an hour away. After the meet, Hood mentioned, a lot of them would forestall for dinner at considered one of the city’s 3 eating places or refill their tank at considered one of the city’s gasoline stations — a spice up to the native economic system.
It’s no longer simply carrying occasions that make the school the middle of the city’s id. It’s the place citizens host potluck fundraisers to lend a hand pay a cherished one’s clinical expenses, or accumulate for the annual Robert Lee BBQ Cookoff. There’s no health club or YMCA in Robert Lee, however the school weight room is open to the public in the evenings and on weekends. So is the playground.
Lupe Torres, the school district’s head of upkeep and amenities, mentioned he doubts many other folks in Austin perceive the indelible connection that rural Texans have to their public colleges.
“Most of the people in this community work hard,” he mentioned. “They’re ranchers, farmers, educators. They’re not asking for a handout to send their children off to some private school.”
Hood, whose father was once superintendent of Robert Lee earlier than he took the activity 17 years in the past, is anxious about what is going to occur to his fatherland if an excessive amount of of the school’s investment is redirected to spiritual colleges that aren’t required to teach all kids and into the school financial savings accounts of homeschooled kids.
He’s noticed it occur in different rural Texas communities. At some level, as populations dwindle, the price range math doesn’t upload up anymore, and rural colleges are pressured to consolidate with adjoining districts — or worse.
“If the school goes down,” Hood mentioned, “the town goes down with it.”
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