Public Education is Open for All

BY JON MARK BEILUERetired Sportswriter/Sports Editor of Amarillo Globe-NewsCurrently serving on the Amarillo I.S.D. Board of Trustees

As one of seven members of the Amarillo ISD Board of Trustees, one of our duties is to visit one of our 55 campuses each month. Each school has a program or instruction that is unique.

Lamar Elementary School has a deaf education program – Regional Day School Program for the Deaf (RESPD). From Lamar, they go to Fannin Middle School, and finally to Caprock High School. Lamar has 30 deaf students of differing degrees of severity from all over the 26 counties of the Texas Panhandle, from pre-K to fifth grade. They are instructed by six teachers and aides.

In a pre-K class with six students, the lesson was on music. They all sat on the stage. Teachers and students played a guitar with equipment set up where they could feel various vibrations on the stage. Their faces were one of excited discovery.

I then went to a first- and second-grade class. There were students from across the region. AISD staff recruits deaf children for the program. In this class of seven under Debbie Thomas, there were children from Borger (45 miles), Dumas (48 miles), Channing (56 miles), Pampa (60 miles) and a little girl from Perryton. Perryton, tucked in the corner of the northeast Panhandle. That’s 120 miles – one way.

Later, as I drove away, it hit me. As war has been declared for a time now against public education from the halls of the state legislature in Austin, it hit me.

Public education takes in all children, takes in all teenagers. All of us. It doesn’t matter the poverty level, the location, family issues, behavior, or disability. We take all. We don’t get to decide, no, we’d rather not. Your child is too much trouble. You just don’t quite fit, but good luck to you.

Yes, you could say we have to take all of them. But in watching Debbie Thomas on the floor pouring into those kids, it’s we get to take you. And her attitude and enthusiasm for her class is not the exception, but the rule in teaching those with special needs and in mainstream classes not only in the Amarillo ISD but around the state.

To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, a free public education is the “last best hope on earth” for so many, for many who don’t have any other options. And that’s lost on many in power in Austin, one in particular in Midland, that want to weaken this system for the many and the diverse for the entitlement of the wealthy few.

They want to brush past Article 7 in the Texas Constitution from 1876: “It shall be the duty of the Legislature of this State to establish and make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of an efficient system of public free schools.”

We hear the focus group term “school choice” thrown around a lot. It’s softer, more palatable in place of a more accurate word we all know. It begins with a “V.” Let’s say it – vouchers. We know we have school choice in Amarillo ISD where 20 percent of students go to school outside their attendance zone and parents can choose a school for almost any reason.

There are parents in Perryton who have school choice. And they have chosen to put their daughter in a van to go 240 miles a day round trip five days a week so she can receive an education unique to her, so she can be loved on, so she can make friends, so she can feel valued because she is.

Public education takes all of us because it is all of us. Schools take what students come to us and educate them and prepares them for a well-rounded life after graduation as best as we can.

“We serve the masses,” said Chad Dunnam, a Region I director on the THSCA board and beginning his seventh season as head football coach at Amarillo High. “We take what we got and we go to work. We don’t make excuses. We as coaches do that every year."

“In the classroom setting, the teacher does that. There’s magic in that. There’s beauty in that. I value that. In public education, we serve the best of the best, but also nurture the worst of the worst.”

Public education is a reflection of changing society, of a diverse culture. At its best, it’s a coming together where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

“We talk about education, and athletics is part of the education process. Not only athletics, but fine arts, music, all of those things,” said Dunnam. “It’s about what it means to have the band playing on a Friday night, what it means to have the football team, the dance team, the cheerleading team. To me, that’s public education at its finest. It’s a sense of community like no other.”

The sense of community. While that conjures a blending and coming together, it’s also the look, that a community is not one size fits all, not all homogenized and coming through the doors with the same socio-economic status and cultural background.

“Public education parallels what the world looks like,” Dunnam said. “We don’t live in a bubble. One of the best things about public education is kids learn to live with and work with all types of people.”

The pro-voucher line is tax money ear-marked for public education that can be used as a stipend for families to pay for private school tuition, which in theory makes private school more affordable to more families.

Yet studies show that states with voucher programs, that rarely is the case. In a number of states, more than 80 percent of private school enrollments in the voucher programs were the same students from the same families as before the vouchers.

In other words, it benefits the select few at the expense of the vast majority. With Texas ranking in the bottom 10 in the United States in public school funding for per student despite billions in available funding, a voucher program will do unnecessary harm to a system the Texas Constitution set apart 148 years ago, further weakening an education system designed for all.

“There’s more to education than English, science and math,” Dunnam said. “It’s learning about different people and learning to work with different people who are not the same color as you, the same economic status. Sometimes we shelter people who don’t want to be exposed to that part of the world and that offends me."

“This world, this state, is very diverse and I want my child exposed to what the world looks like, reflect what the world looks like, and work with people who it’s OK to disagree with and be professional about it. I want my son to have rich friends and poor friends. To me, that’s public education. The U.S. is a total melting pot and a child’s education should reflect that.”

This is what Amarillo ISD specifically and public education in Texas broadly is about, from the deaf child making a 240-mile roundtrip daily to school to the all-state football player from Africa. I hope we as a state never do anything to sacrifice this one-of-akind opportunity for all.

Jon Mark Beilue, a graduate of the Texas public school system, is a member of the Amarillo ISD Board of Trustees. For 37 years, until retirement in 2018, he worked as a sportswriter, sports editor and general columnist at the Amarillo Globe-News. His 17 years as sports editor, from 1989 to 2006, was the longest tenure in the newspaper’s history.