Senator Shappiro

OMG!!! Over the past two days I have been at a conference for those of us that Raise Your Hand Texas sent to Harvard- our reunion! Two days of learning lead by our old Harvard professors and as this is a legislative year- Sen. Shappiro was our speaker at dinner last night. She spoke to us two years ago and promised that as an ex-teacher she would always look out for us and make sure she was making only the best choices for the children of Texas. WOW, how two years has changed that! How you ask? Let me explain! So she gets before a group of 300 principals/ administrators from all over Texas and tells us though she has a speech written up she is going to close it and we will instead have a question/answer session and dialogue so that we can understand what they are doing this session and we can take this info back to our staff, school districts, etc. SO the first person to go up starts by explaining he is a superintendent and on Monday night he will ask for a pay decrease and has to release 6 teachers- and mid sentence she stops him and says "So what's your question?" A big oooooo came over the room. He then said "Well I want to know what do I tell these people? How will we save teachers jobs?" She explains that she cant save teachers jobs and that she has a bill for so many things to make our lives easier. Then a man stands up and says "Well why don't you raise taxes" and she YELLS back at him "Why dont you?" and he says "How? I'm just a principal." And they yelled back and forth until another principal grabbed the mic and said "Mrs. Shappiro, Mrs. Shappiro I have a question and we are all here to help our staff." She then clicked at how poorly she as behaving and apologized for yelling and couldn't believe she got yelled at, but she does have ways to help us and that is why she is proposing so many bills.  The first is to relieve us of restrictions in regards to pesticides used as that law is telling us how to do our jobs and she wants us to focus on children. Then she states she is all for increasing the student teacher ratio to 24:1, I mean what are two more students and if your whole school averages out to the magic number you are ok. Then she was asked about preK and how we could keep it. She stated something else, but the last pat of this statement was "It's just overpriced daycare anyway!" The room was shocked. She then said our focus is on EOC, this is going to be best thing ever and she is working hard to give us a test to replace the TAKS and save the day and that IT will be rolled out. She then said we could form a committee to discuss with her more about EOC. Someone told her there is a crazy amount of money being set aside for Pearson and why must we use Pearson instead of national tests this will save money. She said that was a good idea, but they only put aside $98 million for STAAR. ONLY? We all gasped again. A principal then said "Think of  how many teaching jobs we could save! She said she can't save job rights now, we are trying to stay out of a major deficit. At this point, so many people walked out- they couldn't take it anymore. Another principal got up with a copy of the Texas Tribune and read a quote she said about "we are finally going to challenge kids" and she said she did say the first part of the quote, but did not say the "Finally" part! The crowd then started mumbling that they didn't believe her. It was so BAD! What made her think that a group of principals were going to be so excited to hear all of this! She told us not to believe everything we read or hear from the news. She told us she is working to get half of the rainy day fund out for our use. She also stated that at the end of all of this we will all be so happy that it isn't all gloom and doom like the media would like us to believe. She stated she doesn't know much about school finance and there are only three people in the house who do- another gasp. For every request we made she said she had a bill for that or that we could create a committee to meet with her. The last thing that was discussed was charter schools and how they can kick kids out and we can't and how unfair that was. You ready for this- she didn't know this was happening. And she is our voice? She chairs the committee that holds our destiny? We better get writing to get our voice heard- this is going to be a rough session! Anyone ready to go to Austin to be on a committee?? Oh one last thing- she said discretionary funds would be the first thing to go! Good luck with that!