Thousands take message to spare schools to Austin

Thousands of educators and supporters rally at the Texas Capitol to decry looming budget cuts and elimination of jobs for educators on Saturday, Mar. 12, 2011. Kin Man Hui/kmhui@express-news.net Thousands of educators and supporters rally at the Texas Capitol to decry looming budget cuts and elimination of jobs for educators on Saturday, Mar. 12, 2011. Kin Man Hui/kmhui@express-news.net Photo: KIN MAN HUI, Kin Man Hui/kmhui@express-news.net Photo: KIN MAN HUI, Kin Man Hui/kmhui@express-news.net Image 1 of / 39 Caption Close Thousands take message to spare schools to Austin 1 / 39 Back to Gallery

AUSTIN — Thousands of teachers, public school employees, parents and students swarmed the state Capitol grounds Saturday to protest the steep education cuts that Gov. Rick Perry and many Texas lawmakers are pushing to close a budget shortfall.

The rowdy but peaceful gathering, which organizers said numbered at least 11,000, focused on a simple message: Don't abandon children and their future. Don't lay off teachers. Don't increase class sizes. Don't cut music, theater and art classes.

Chau Tran, selected as teacher of the year in 2010 at her elementary school in Austin, told the crowd she learned recently that she might get laid off next year.

“I was stunned and devastated,” she told the crowd. “I love teaching. It's my passion. We are not numbers, we are not positions. We are people.”

Dalton Sherman, 12, a Dallas elementary school student whose talks about hope and opportunity have earned him a television spot on Oprah, drew frenzied applause.

Perry wants lawmakers to close a $27 billion revenue shortfall — the amount needed to maintain current services, including enrollment growth for public schools — without raising taxes or using the state's $9.4 billion “rainy-day fund.”

“It's raining!” Sherman shouted, triggering a loud “It's Raining!” chant from the audience.

Some signs in the audience repeated that theme — “It's raining in my school district” — and some took anger-filled aim at Perry. “Gov. Liar” read one.

“Cutting school funds is a Perry bad idea,” Alicia Zon, 12, a sixth-grader from Four Points Middle School in Leander near Austin, yelled repeatedly as she walked along Congress Avenue with a group of her classmates on their way to the rally.

San Antonio's Northside ISD Superintendent John Folks urged the crowd not to allow Perry and lawmakers to balance the state's budget “on the backs of our schoolchildren.”

It will be hard to guess the impact of the massive rally and another pro-education demonstration set for Monday, said House Public Education Chairman Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands.

“We're limited by the parameters of the budget,” Eissler said. “This session, it's not going to be more” funding.

Public sentiment for school funding must be balanced against an equally strong opposition to higher taxes, Eissler said.

“It forces you to make choices that you haven't had to before,” he said. “I don't see a long-term, upward trend to funding more and more.”

The trend will have to shift to making schools more efficient and productive, he said.

“This is not about too much spending,” San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro told the crowd. “Texas already ranks near the bottom in per-person spending” and last among states in the percentage of adults with high school diplomas.

He credited a public school education in Edgewood ISD for preparing him and his brother, state Rep. Joaquín Castro, D-San Antonio, for Stanford University and Harvard Law School.

Today's students are reaching for the same American dream, the mayor said, “and the question in this legislative session is, ‘Are we going to say yes to their dreams?'”

Texas is home to more Fortune 500 companies than any other state, but it's unclear “how long they will stick around” if it can't produce students to handle new technology, Castro said.

Rally participants said they were energized by their fear that Republican majorities in the state House and Senate are ignoring a financial structure that only can worsen school funding as time goes on — and by a recent Perry remark that seemed to shift blame for looming layoffs away from state government and onto local school districts.

“Millionaire senators: cut my pay to minimum wage and I will still come into the classroom and teach the kids who need me,” said a defiant John Kuhn, superintendent of Perrin-Whitt Consolidated Independent School District in Jack County in North Texas. “Bail out the bankers and bankrupt the teachers. We will still teach.”

A spokeswoman for the governor, Katherine Cesinger, said the state's overall budget problems require Texas leaders “to separate the wants from needs and cut spending.”

“Gov. Perry has listened to the people of Texas who have spoken loud and clear — they want their government to be leaner and more efficient, and we have a responsibility to taxpayers to do just that,” she said.

The economic recession has contributed to sagging state revenue, although the problems took root in May 2006 when the Legislature cut school property taxes in response to a Texas Supreme Court order to fix an unconstitutional funding system.

Perry and other state leaders promoted a revised business tax to help pay for the school property tax cuts.

The non-partisan Legislative Budget Board and Carole Keeton Strayhorn, then the state comptroller, predicted the swap would create a revenue shortfall of at least $23 billion over five years. Perry dismissed the warnings, arguing that property tax cuts would ignite economic growth that Strayhorn and the LBB had ignored in their calculations.

This year, John Heleman, chief revenue estimator for Comptroller Susan Combs, told lawmakers a $5 billion-per-year budget shortfall would continue to repeat itself in future years unless they adjusted revenue and expenses.

Most lawmakers were not in the Capitol on Saturday but will be in their offices Monday when teachers plan to use their Spring Break to make their point again.

Most school districts from San Antonio had some representation in the crowd and many carried signs identifying them.

“I'm here because I don't want to end up with a poor education and dumber than my peers who I will be competing with for college and jobs,” said Katrina McNairy, 17, a junior at Johnson High School in North East Independent School District.

Ruby Miller, a parent of two kids attending Wood Middle School, helped organize the NEISD group.

“I think when you add the voices of the parents to those working in education, that's going to be hard for Perry and the legislators to not hear us quite loudly that these cuts must not happen,” Miller said.