After a bus driver got sick one recent afternoon, Aaron Hood, the district superintendent of the Robert Lee Independent School, took his place. Slipping behind the wheel in a button-up shirt and tie, he cruised down country roads, past farmland, and wind farms to get home to a few dozen students in this small West Texas town.
Here, where cattle outnumber children 20 to 1, no one is whining about important race theories in textbooks or pornography in the library. But those battles 250 miles away in the state capital and in distant suburbs have sparked a political movement that Hood fears could deal a devastating blow to rural school districts like his.
Due to increased campaign spending by far-right Christian megadonors, Republicans in Texas and nationwide are pushing legislation that would siphon money from public education under the banner of “parental rights.” These plans, commonly known as vouchers, would give parents the money the state would have spent educating their children in public schools – between $8,000 and $10,000 per child per year in Texas – and Let them be it homeschooling expenses, private school tuition, or college savings accounts.
Officials in communities like Robert Lee, which has a population of about 1,000, warn that these policies will drain already razor-thin public school budgets. Hood said that with only 250 students — about 18 kids per grade — even a slight drop in enrollment and funding could force rural schools like Robert Lee to make tough decisions.
“We don’t have the same economies of scale as larger districts,” he said, which is one reason he obtained a commercial driver’s license to serve as a substitute bus driver. “If we lose five or 10 students, that’s a teacher’s salary. But we can’t keep one teacher less, so now we’re cutting academic programs, we’re cutting sports, we’re cutting those Cutting back on the things this community depends on.”
As president of the Texas Association of Rural Schools, a collection of 362 public school districts that are united in their opposition to vouchers, Hood and his fellow small-town superintendents are trying to sound the alarm in Austin. They decry what they call “school choice” or “education freedom” in favor of the state GOP’s wealthy campaign donors as a betrayal of the party’s rural base.
In a remote county where 9 out of 10 voters cast ballots for then-President Donald Trump in 2020, Hood and other school leaders worry that many local families will not pay attention to the debate until it is too late.
“No one opposes school choice, but that’s not really what we’re talking about,” Hood said. “It all depends on how you ask the question. If you ask people in this community whether they support sending their tax dollars to private schools without accountability and standards, they will tell you Will tell that they are against it.
Gov. Greg Abbott has made education freedom an emergency priority this legislative session, in a reversal from years past when he toed the line between the interests of pro-voucher activists and the concerns of rural constituents.
Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesman for Abbott, said in an email that the school choice programs “bridge the partisan divide” and are supported by “the voters of rural Texas.” He pointed to a January survey conducted by the University of Houston Hobby School of Public Affairs that found a majority of Texans — including 62% of those living in rural counties — are more likely than parents to send their children to private schools. supported giving tax-funded vouchers for
To rally support for the cause, Abbott has staged several events alongside leaders of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an influential conservative think tank that has fought to end the “government monopoly in public education”. Have done
Despite its branding as a tour to highlight support for school choice in rural Texas, all of the governor’s stops have been held at private Christian schools in medium-sized cities, including Amarillo, a West Texas metro. with a population roughly the size of Charleston. West Virginia.
Wes Washam, president of Robert Lee’s school board, laughed when he heard about the incident.
“Amarillo is not rural,” he said, noting that the closest private school, in Robert Lee, is more than 30 miles away. “We’re opting out of the conversation.”
Spend money, win votes
For several years, an unlikely coalition of rural Republican lawmakers and urban Democrats built a wall against private school vouchers in the Texas Legislature. But political spending by conservative Christian megadonors has helped fend off opposition within the Texas GOP — including the state Senate district represented by Robert Lee.
Until this year, Senate District 31 was held by longtime Republican Kel Seliger, whose steadfast opposition to vouchers helped turn him into a target of ultra-conservative political action committees like Defend Texas Liberty and the now-defunct Empower Texans. Both PACs receive most of their funding from the families of Tim Dunn and Farris Wilkes, a pair of billionaire oil and fracking magnates who have expressed the view that government and education should be guided by biblical values.
“They set out to make an example of me,” Seliger said.
PACs have spent millions of dollars over the past decade supporting the GOP’s primary opponents Seliger and other moderate Republicans, ousting a handful of legislators and winning concessions from others. Seliger always managed to stay in his seat — until last year, just as the backlash against school diversity programs began to supercharge the nationwide movement for private school vouchers.
Ahead of Seliger’s 2022 re-election campaign, several far-right donors threw their support behind his latest primary challenger, Kevin Sparks, a Midland oilman who served on the board of the pro-voucher Texas Public Policy Foundation. Sparks also sits on the board of trustees of Midland Classical Academy, a private Christian school founded by Dunn, whose family donated $200,000 to Sparks’ campaign. Afterward, Trump jumped into the race, endorsing Sparks and calling Seliger a Rino – Republican in Name Only.
NBC News requested interviews with Sparks, Wilkes, and Dunn, but they declined or did not respond.
After two decades in the legislature – facing an uphill re-election battle and concluding that the Texas Republican Party was “virtually derailed” – Seliger decided to retire.
“Now was a good time to leave,” he said, “because I could leave on my own terms.”
Sparks, who easily won the Republican primary and ran unopposed in the general election, was sworn in in January in Seliger’s former seat in favor of school choice. The freshman senator’s district includes 91 public school systems that stretch from the Texas Panhandle to the oil-rich Permian Basin; An NBC News analysis found that all but six of them are small rural districts with no local private school options.
Seliger argued that the interests of public schools in those communities were no longer fully represented in the Texas Senate.
“These powerful donors felt they could buy the campaign,” he said. “Those people essentially own those seats now, and they’re going to get what they want from them.”
Lobbying for rural support
On his private Christian school road tour, Abbott has pitched school choice as a way of empowering parents to protect their children from the “wrong agenda” he says is perpetrated by some public school teachers. being pushed.
Such accusations seem fanciful to many in Robert Lee, where both the town and the school district were named unintentionally in honor of the famous Confederate general’s military service in Texas before the Civil War.
The biggest political controversy Hood has faced in recent years is the strictness of the dress code. “When you get all your students ages 5 to 18 in one building,” he said, “you have to be conservative.”
And yet, according to Hood and other rural school officials, conservative districts like Robert Lee stand to suffer the direst consequences under Republican plans.
Because Texas public schools are funded by a mix of local tax revenue and state dollars — with state funds distributed on a per-student basis — rural districts can see their funds cut in one of two ways: either to local students, Per-pupil funding for each district is reduced as a result of losing direct vouchers, or as a result of reducing the overall pot of state funds to cover private and homeschooling expenses for students in outlying cities and suburbs.
“Imagine making that pitch to a rural voter,” Hood said. “You’re going to take our tax money and give it to a parent in the Dallas suburbs so their kid can go to an expensive private school? No way.”
Republican leaders have attempted to deflect those criticisms. Under Senate Bill 8, the major school choice bill before the Legislature, parents who pull their children out of public school would be eligible to receive $8,000 per child each year in an education savings account. To make up for that funding loss, districts with fewer than 20,000 students would receive $10,000 per year from the state to make up for each student lost to the program — but only for the first two years after a child is enrolled. For. And the savings accounts would only be available to students currently attending public schools and children entering kindergarten, not children already attending private schools.
The bill, titled The Texas Parental Bill of Rights, also gives parents greater oversight of public school curriculum while prohibiting schools from providing instruction “with respect to sexual orientation or gender identity” at all grade levels.
In a statement, state Sen. Brandon Creighton, the bill’s Republican author, framed the legislation as a compromise between “parents, teachers, employers, and students.”
But Michael Lee, executive director of the Texas Association of Rural Schools, said the concessions don’t change his organization’s position on vouchers. He said the $10,000 temporary payment to small districts and the cap on student eligibility would delay, not prevent, cuts in rural schools.
“We continue to encourage legislators who represent our rural school districts to vote in the best interests of their constituents,” Lee said.
‘Not asking for handout’
A few days after picking up a route for a sick bus driver, Hood was in the press box overlooking the Robert Lee Steers Athletic Complex at the start of a middle school track meet.
PA Announcer: Another job that sometimes falls to the superintendent of a small town school.
Families and student-athletes came to Robert Lee from eight other rural school districts, some of them more than an hour away. After the meeting, Hood said, many of them would stop for dinner at one of the city’s three restaurants or fill up their tank at one of the city’s gas stations — a boost to the local economy.
It is not just the sporting events that make the school the center of the city’s identity. It’s where residents host potluck fundraisers to help pay a loved one’s medical bills or gather for the annual Robert Lee BBQ Cookoff. There is no gym or YMCA at Robert Lee, but the school weight room is open to the public in the evenings and on weekends. So is the playing field.
Lupe Torres, the school district’s head of maintenance and facilities, said he doubts many people in Austin understand the indelible connection rural Texans have to their public schools.
“Most people in this community work hard,” he said. “They are cattle herders, farmers, teachers. They are not asking for handouts to send their children to a private school.”
Hood, whose father was its superintendent before Robert Lee took over 17 years ago, is concerned about the consequences if too much of the school’s money is redirected to religious schools that may not be necessary to educate all children. So what will happen to his hometown. College savings accounts for homeschooled kids.
He’s seen it happen in other rural Texas communities. At some point, as populations shrink, the budget math doesn’t add up anymore, and rural schools are forced to consolidate with adjacent districts—or worse.
Hood said, “If the school goes down, the city goes down with it.”