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Michael Shawn Kelly[/caption]
Michael Shawn Kelly
[email protected] 281-350-0515 www.campaigntexas.com Michael Shawn Kelly has degrees in floriculture and landscape architecture from Texas A&M University. Kelly is the founder and chief architect of Mirror Lakes Design in Spring and has lived in District 150 for more than 35 years with his wife, children and grandchildren.
What do you believe are the biggest challenges facing District 150?
The quality of life, undoubtedly. If you have bought the house where you plan on living, and they build a very cheaply subsidized housing project across from your subdivision, your neighborhood values go down, businesses start falling apart, crime goes up and the school system falls apart. [Also], we keep asking our teachers to do more and more with less and less, and it’s ridiculous. That’s what I’ve seen in 35 years of working with people: If the schools are strong, if the neighborhoods are strong, then everyone has a chance to do well.
How would you respond to these challenges?
All [teachers] really want is to have a class size that’s manageable. They want to have the materials that they need so they’re not digging into their own pockets to buy materials, and they want to have the time to be effective. Right now, we’re not doing any of that through our Legislature. It probably will take more money. But the thing is, we need twice as many teachers, and we need them right now. We need to group the kids according to their learning abilities. [In regard to subsidized housing], that would be a straight-out “no” to how they’re doing it. You have to look into doing it a better way. You actually go ahead and do some grants to our universities here and tell them to come up with some ideas.
