All God’s children can learn. Fort Worth ISD bonds will help those who need it most

As Fort Worth clergy committed to excellent public education for every child, we stand solidly behind our community’s $1.5 billion school bond program to renovate our 24 middle schools.

The bond campaign has generated a discussion of student learning loss in the wake of the pandemic. We welcome this focus on the education of our children.

But we need a more balanced approach to the assessment of our schools. The low ratings cited are based only on one kind of assessment — the annual standardized test. The State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, is one test given on one day. How can children who are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” as Holy Scripture teaches, be properly assessed by a sterile standardized test that reduces them to a data point?

We must acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of our Fort Worth schoolchildren are poor. About 86% are economically disadvantaged. Many come to school every day without the family provision and security at home that are essential for academic success.

These children are as gifted in their God-given ability to learn as any other children, but not without the extraordinary educational interventions and resources we have consistently denied them in Texas. Our state ranks near the bottom of the nation in per-pupil public education spending. It is hypocrisy for us to pontificate that “poverty isn’t destiny” while withholding the very assistance these children need to succeed.

Ask Fort Worth school district teachers what they lack and they will rattle off a litany of needs. They will begin with overcrowded classrooms. They will remind us of the many school positions cut: counselors, librarians, nurses, classroom assistants, community liaisons, music programs, art and dance classes, coaches.

We speak glibly of “parental engagement,” when these hard-working parents — many of them single parents — hold down multiple jobs to make ends meet, and simply do not have time for parent/teacher meetings or PTA.

Even more morally egregious is the fear that many parents who do not speak English harbor in approaching a civic institution such as a public school, given our present fraught political climate on the issue of immigration.

As pastors, we know these factors are real. We see them when visiting our schools. We hear about them from the educators in our congregations who are laboring diligently, under adverse conditions of long hours and low pay, with minimal community support.

All of this has been exacerbated during the pandemic, laying bare the economic inequities baked into our public education system. Indeed, we are grateful the Star-Telegram highlighted the game-changing emphasis on racial and economic equity that Superintendent Kent Scribner and the FWISD board have brought to our district. This visionary and transformative initiative will bear good fruit for years to come.

To blame our educators now for our decades-long failure to level the playing field for poor kids isn’t only unfair. It also blithely absolves us of our responsibility to make our elected officials in Austin do their duty before God and their fellow Texans to “make suitable provision for the operation and maintenance of public free schools,” as the Texas Constitution explicitly requires.

The Nov. 2 bond election is the direct result of decades of kicking the can down the road. The can should be kicked no further.

We all bear moral responsibility to educate our children. Let’s not scapegoat our superintendent and school board for systemic inadequacies that we should have corrected long ago.

Vote yes on the bond proposals that will revitalize our schools and help every child.

This story was originally published October 29, 2021 at 6:04 AM.