Texas Blog

Yesterday marked a huge win for over 600 school districts when the Honorable John Dietz said that the State doesn’t current fund public education adequately or efficiently. 

"There is no free lunch," Dietz said while issuing his ruling. "We either want increased standards and are willing to pay the price, or we don't."

Last week, several of our parent leaders whose children attend public schools (both traditional and charter) in Senate District 6, led our endorsement process to select an education champion to fill the seat left open by the late Senator Mario Gallegos. Together, we drafted a questionnaire and conducted in-person interviews in order to ask candidates where they stood on educational issues that were most important to us and Houston kids – school funding, access to high-quality pre-k, teacher quality and high-quality charter schools expansion and accountability.

Earlier this week, I participated in “Principal for a Day,” an initiative through the Dallas Independent School District that brings community leaders into schools across the district. The program hopes to raise awareness of the strengths and challenges our local schools face. It also allows community members, like myself, to make sure that Dallas has a quality public education for all students.

As I walked through classrooms, I was struck by a student’s work highlighted on a bulletin board. It made me laugh out loud.

Life is full of unseen opportunities to change others’ lives for the better. Offering the simplest of gestures, or not, can sometimes be a deciding factor in whether the students I serve make it to graduation or not. As a high school principal, I experience this every day.

However, I am not only speaking as a principal. You see, as a teen, I was a high school dropout.