Galveston's school bond plan falls short

Houston Chronicle ^ | February 6, 2002 | KEVIN MORAN

[Cincinatus' Wife]

GALVESTON -- A protest over the closing of a neighborhood middle school scuttled a controversial $35 million Galveston school district bond package Tuesday.

The measure's failure portends a delay of perhaps a year or more for badly needed improvements to the air-conditioning systems on many of the Galveston Independent School District campuses. But bond package opponents said they believe the lopsided vote will force the district to abandon plans to close Austin Middle School in the island's poorer East End.

The bond package, which included a new swimming pool, field house and gym class locker rooms at Ball High School, failed by a margin of 56 percent to 44 percent, or 3,054 to 2,401 votes.

"I think it's a great victory for the schoolchildren of Galveston," said Elizabeth Beeton, spokeswoman for a group called Taxpayers Against Higher Taxes for Poorer Education. "I think we'll keep three neighborhood middle schools now, and I think it will cause the school board to recognize how important the voters consider neighborhood schools to be."

But school board President John Ford said the 63-year-old Austin school won't be saved.

"This vote had no effect on the Austin issue," Ford said.

Ford said the school won't close sooner than the planned 2004 date but that it will close.

He said he does not expect another bond package to finance critically needed improvements in the district in the near future.

The bond proposal met opposition from many district parents, residents and alumni of Austin Middle School, which district officials have vowed to close after the 2003-04 school year.

Citing dropping enrollment and the need to pump $4 million in repairs into Austin, district officials stressed that the school's fate and the bond proposal were separate issues.

Bond issue opponents accused district officials of reneging on a promise that a $24.5 million issue approved in 1994 would allow maintaining and improving three middle schools.

Foes said the proposal promised little or no direct improvement in academics and failed to address teacher quality and qualifications at Austin in particular, where more than half the teachers were not certified last year.

Closing Austin would mean moving about 500 Austin students to Central Middle School in 2004 and moving 150 or more Central students to Weis Middle School.

The failed bond package included spending $13 million on air-conditioning work on all but the Austin and Alamo Elementary schools and $7 million for a new school to replace the aging facility on Bolivar Peninsula.

That campus would serve about 270 children in kindergarten through eighth grade.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Taxpayers Against Higher Taxes for Poorer Education

Feb. 5, 2002, 9:13PM Greenspan: Schools should focus on math Associated Press

[Full text] WASHINGTON -- Schools need to do better at teaching basic mathematics to reduce an alarming lack of knowledge about fundamental financial concepts, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said Tuesday.

Greenspan said many studies have pointed to a critical need to improve financial literacy, the lack of which Greenspan said leaves millions of Americans vulnerable to financial losses from unscrupulous business practices.

"An informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse," Greenspan told the Senate Banking Committee.

He said schools should teach basic financial concepts better in elementary and secondary schools.

A good foundation in math, Greenspan said, would improve financial literacy and "help prevent younger people from making poor financial decisions that can take years to overcome."

Greenspan told the senators he learned as a young child to work with percentages by keeping up with baseball batting averages.

"It has been my experience that competency in mathematics, both in numerical manipulation and in understanding its conceptual foundations, enhances a person's ability to handle the more ambiguous and qualitative relationships that dominate our day-to-day financial decision making," he said. [End]