It's Time to Create Change

I have to play devil's advocate here for just a minute.  Indulge me.

I know there are many things wrong with BISD that need to be fixed.  I know that it is going to take the entire city coming together to achieve the restoration of BISD to a solid school district.  But where do we start?  And really, I don't want to talk about ALL of BISD...I just want to talk about one thing that I think has been overlooked by some.

I live in a neighborhood that sits outside the city limits but is in the BISD boundaries.  We are sometimes seen as what we call "the stepchildren of BISD."  My neighborhood and a few other areas around us have the craziest track of schools in the district.  Our elementary school is a very good school...one of the consistently high rating schools in the district.  We are dual zoned to two of the three high schools...one is very far from us and is the school where our area has always been zoned to go...I think that's been lost by some.  For middle school...well that's where the real problem lies.

The middle school is consistently low rated.  Along with our area, the students come from the north side of town.  I don't know when things got to the point they are now nor do I know how the middle school we are zoned to became to be so low rated.  When I was in middle school, this was the better school to attend...or so we thought in the north end of Beaumont.  Now, no one in my neighborhood wants to send their children there.  Parents camp out at administration early in February to request a transfer to the west end schools.  Other, like me, have their children test into the Pegasus program at another middle school...that program is incredibly successful and several of the kids that went with David will be graduating a year early because of it.

Why are we allowing that to happen?  Aren't we, by choosing to send our students to other schools, only adding to the problem?  Wouldn't our highly successful students help the lower ranking school with their attendance and test scores?  Why have we become so fearful of sending our students to that school?

Someone needs to be brave enough to start enacting change.  Sitting back waiting for a dysfunctional school board to make a change for a small segment of the district is getting us nowhere.  So why not be proactive instead of reactive?  Just voting in a different school board member will not change the situation.  We have seen that one or two votes on that board make no difference.  As long as we are not actively trying to make the school we are zoned to better we are part of the problem.  It's time we become part of the solution.