PISD was selected in January as one of eight districts in Texas by education advocacy group Raise Your Hand Texas. The organization is building a network of districts to help provide community insight for the upcoming legislative session beginning in 2025.
In the coming weeks, PISD will take the feedback gathered from its residents and join other districts in Austin to discuss the takeaways.
The gist
PISD had four “listening circles” from May through August, which consisted of parents, community members, a special-programs parent group and the District Educational Improvement Committee, according to PISD agenda documents.
According to district documents, the following topics were some of the top-voiced concerns or needs within the four sessions:
- Increased funding for public education to address students’ growing needs and support educators’ professional development
- Increased funding to support smaller class sizes
- Additional resources and staffing to support mental health and well-being initiatives for students and staff
- Flexibility and full inclusion in curriculum to accommodate diverse student needs
- Highlight the importance of parental involvement in addressing behavioral issues and provide resources to help parents support their children's learning and behavior at home
- Opportunities for educators to directly engage with state lawmakers, such as through shadowing programs or advisory boards, to ensure that policy decisions reflect the realities of classroom teaching
The district held one more listening session for the board of trustees and district officials at its Sept. 10 meeting.
Many board members said they believed funding is the biggest challenge facing public schools in Texas.
“Cultural pressures, political pressures, the societal pressures for us to do something outside of the scope of what we need to be doing—a lot of times it does get tied to funding mechanisms,” board trustee Kris Schoeffler said at the meeting. “I feel like we need to drive what our desires are in our public schools in our independent school district and not kowtow to those outside pressures.”
PISD board President Crystal Carbone said state mandates are also a rising challenge for educators.
“We have so many mandates that people don’t understand the ramifications of those mandates,” Carbone said at the meeting. “It relates to funding, but it also is putting more tasks on our administrators and our teachers than they’ve ever been accountable for before, and it’s losing the focus ... of keeping the main thing and that is the student and their academic success.”
What’s next
Four PISD district officials will travel to Austin from Sept. 18-20 for the next RYHT Trustee Advocates Cohort session to form data and input from the district’s listening sessions into an advocacy agenda.
The list of districts and session dates for the program can be found on RYHT’s website.
“A lot of times we don’t advocate for ourselves, we let things happen to us, but we want to get in front of this, especially with the legislator going into session,” PISD Superintendent Larry Berger said.
