Bay Area Houston

Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this one out. So who’s in favor of school vouchers? Teachers aren’t. The vast majority of parents aren’t. Their constituents aren’t but that doesn’t matter to them and for good reasons.

Senator Money Mayes Middleton has self financed his campaigns. He owes no one not even his constituents. he recently wrote an op-ed supporting vouchers claiming that parent know what’s best for their children (they don’t). He is all in for vouchers.

Representative Dennis Paul. Paul isn’t going to upset the apple cart for fear of being primaried. Abbott has him by the nose. he is a solid vote.

Representative Terri Wilson out of Galveston is exclusively funded by Texans for Lawsuit reform [sic]. She knows who butters her bread and it’s not teachers. She is another solid vote.

CCISD Trustee Scott Bowen. Corporal Chaos is too much in bed with the party to be against vouchers even though CCISD is clearly against it. Will he travel to Austin and testify? We will be watching.

Tony Buzbee. Tony is running for Houston’s city council and doesn’t know what the fuck he is doing. I threw him in because Scott likes him.

At times I like to make stuff up. Unfortunately this is not one of those times.

Bay Area’s own Senator Money Mayes Middleton has filed Senate Bill 1396 to allow prayer in school and time set aside for reading the Bible. According to the bill analysis:

S.B. 1396 would address these concerns by allowing the board of trustees of a school district or the governing body of an open-enrollment charter school not operated by or affiliated with a religious organization to, by record vote, adopt a policy requiring every campus or school to provide a period of prayer and readings from the Bible.

This, of course, means providing a time for prayer for all including Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and even atheists who will instead spend their time reading or studying math or science. Implementation would be difficult since Muslims pray at various times of the day while Christians just pray whenever they can rub it into other students faces or when being shot at by an 18 year old with an assault weapon that Middleton gave easy access to.

School Boards across the state are struggling just to keep kids safe in school and teachers and support staff employed as Middleton continues to cut their budgets. If this bill would pass they would need to understand all the various religions and their prayer habits and bibles. Maybe they need to create a religious committee where members of the community of all different religions could come together in peace and make recommendations on how to implement this policy.

Or maybe they could just go to school to learn math and science and go to their churches to learn about their own religion.

Can we do it again?

CCISD voters have rejected UFOs (Unqualified For Office) candidates in the past. The CCISD’s version of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Christine Parizo, lost by 25% but she demanded recounts and opinions from the Texas Attorney General leading to her being escorted out of a CCISD Board meeting.

Misty Dawson, one of the biggest UFOs to ever run for school board lost but only by 40 votes. She literally was unable to answer questions at an education forum. She lost and after a recount pulled a republican trick and sued like the whiny little witches of the Harris County Republican Party. She was recruited by Trustee Scott Bowen and funded in part by the party.

This election is different. Trustee Bowen reached out to his buddies at Defend Texas Liberty PAC, to fund Peter Lauzon’s campaign. This group is funded by two billionaires, featured on CNN, with the sole purpose of flooding school districts with partisan money in order to take over the boards. Lauzon is also lacking in education experience and common decency. His many faults should be enough for him to be disqualified from running for any office but when you have billionaires funding your campaign anything can happen.

We are waiting for that anything to happen. CCISD voters have seen the chaos brought to the board by partisan hacks like Scott Bowen pushing the CRT unicorn and the attacks on our gay family members, parents, teachers, students, and CCISD workers. Hopefully they will see through their bullshit even after being flooded with mailers from the billionaires. Our kids, teachers, parents, and the community deserve better.

BTW. Campaign finance reports are due this Friday. We will see if anyone is hiding donations.

In an article with the Houston Chronicle, candidate for CCISD Trustee, Peter Lauson claims to want to take politics out of the school board. Unfortunately we have him on video and now in ink saying the exact opposite.

Lauzon is a former member of the State Republican Executive Committee (SREC). He helped draft and voted to approve the Republican platform. The platform is what his party, and he, believes in. It outlines their goals and intentions and it is NOT in the best interest of the parents, teachers, and students of CCISD. If elected this is what you can expect from him as a Trustee. Here are just some of the high[low]lights of his platform. The entire platform can be read here.

155. Homosexuality: Homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice. (How are teachers, parents, students, staff, who are gay or who have loved ones who are gay and attend CCISD suppose to interpret this statement coming from a candidate for Trustee?)

31. Prayer, Bible, and Ten Commandments in Schools: We support prayer, the Bible, and the Ten Commandments being returned to our schools, courthouses, and other government buildings. (What kind of prayer? Islam? Buddhist? or just the word of Jesus Christ their savior?)

101. School Choice: Texas families shall be empowered to choose from public, private, charter, or homeschool options for their children’s education, and the funding shall follow the student without strings attached. (ie Vouchers)

103. Parents’ Rights in Education: Parents are the primary educators and disciplinarians of their children, to which all other entities are inferior. (As if parents know better than teachers in education matters)

106. Inappropriate and/or Harmful Content: We request that the Texas Legislature pass legislation that requires Texas schools and libraries to filter inappropriate and/or harmful content, such as pornography, for minors. (This is already done but they want to ban anything that references the gay community. See 155 above)

108. Religious Freedom and Public Schools: We urge school administrators and officials not to infringe on Texas school students’ and staffs’ rights to pray and engage in religious speech, individually or in groups, on school property without government interference. (That is already done.)

112. American Identity: We favor strengthening our common American identity, which includes the contribution and assimilation of diverse racial and ethnic groups. We reject Critical Race Theory as a post-Marxist ideology that seeks to undermine the system of law and order itself and to reduce individuals to their group identity alone. We support legislation to remove this ideology from government programs, including education involving race, discrimination, and racial awareness. 

115. Bilingual Education: We encourage non-English-speaking students to transition, via best practices, to English within two years, allowing them to quickly assimilate and succeed in American society. (As opposed to learning multiple languages to compete in a global environment)

123. Withdraw from Taxpayer-Funded Lobby Groups Like TASB: Local independent school districts should sever all ties with taxpayer funded lobby groups including the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB), the Texas Association of School Administrators (TASA), and the Texas Association of Community Schools (TACS). 

This is who Peter Lauzon is. This is what he voted for. This is what he believes in. The only way he should come close to a school is if he bought a ticket to a school carnival.

Wow. Two Caught on Camera posts in one week!

There was a hearing for Senate Bill 175 which would gut the ability of the Texas Association of School Boards to advocate on behalf of the 1025 school boards that are members. According to their website:

The Texas Association of School Boards (TASB) is a voluntary, nonprofit, statewide educational association that serves and represents local Texas school boards and was established in 1949 with two main goals in mind:

To share information through publications and training to help Texas board members serve their communities more effectively.

To speak with a unified voice to decision makers to chart the best future for Texas public schools.

Trustee Scott Bowen, identifying himself as a Trustee of CCISD and speaking as a Trustee, on behalf of less than 50% of those who voted for him, spent his “own time and own dime” to speak in support of cutting TASB advocacy and giving the State more control over a local school district.

TASB has 1025 districts as members out of 1250 districts in the entire state. They were created in 1949 and have sustained their membership for over 30 years. They do the job that Trustees, working parents, teachers, and students can’t do. They advocate for public education, informing and advising elected officials on the impacts of legislation.

If you have ever been a citizen lobbyist (I have) you know how much time it takes from work and your family to speak with staff and elected officials and to speak at hearings. Unlike the high paid lobbyists working for the homebuilders in Texas, I could only spend a week or two in Austin to advocate for consumers. The little guys (you and your family) are out gunned especially when it comes to the cost of home insurance, electricity, new homes, and other consumer issues.

And students, parents, and teachers are also out gunned especially when the State and Scott Bowen is hell bent on dismantling public education. You can watch Bowen’s 3 minutes of fame here.

This is just plain dishonest.

Peter Lauzon is running for CCISD Trustee. He is a political hack, deeply involved with the Republican Party, recruited by Trustee Scott Bowen, another political hack, will probably be funded by the party and should never be anywhere near a public school. I have said this before about Lauzon:

So here comes yet another election denier, one that will whine if they lose instead of graciously accepting the loss and move on. Lauzon has strong ties to Scott Bowen, the Corporal Chaos of CCISD and the Republican Party. He was a member of the Texas Republican Executive Committee. His wife is the Vice President of the Bay Area Republican Women’s Club. Lauzon, as a Committee member, motioned for the Texas Republican Party to endorse Bowen and they did. He most probably will have tens of thousands of dollars to spend from his party just as Scott Bowen did in latest reelection.

So it just bothers the living snot out of me when Lauzon, in his interview with the Houston Chronicle, says “Lauzon said as a trustee he would ensure that politics stays out of the board’s decision-making process and work to create an environment of accountability to students and parents.”

What an incredibly dishonest statement. Just like his predecessors, Misty Dawson and Christine Parizo, Lauzon is claiming he wants to keep politics out of the CCISD board yet he is the only person running that will bring extreme right wing politics into the board along side of Scott Bowen. This is dishonesty at it’s worse.

To compound this, Lauzon claims that CCISD needs to prepare kids for careers outside of attending college. Someone ought to tell Lauzon that CCISD has one of the BEST programs in the State that does exactly that. Maybe he should get a tour of the CTE (not CRT) program at CCISD before opening his pie hole. The Career and Technical Education program provides students with the opportunity to prepare for college as well as a career in many different fields such as IT, Constructions, Audio/Visual, Culinary, manufacturing and more. It is a very impressive program.

The fact that Lauzon doesn’t even know of this program is yet another hint that he has no business being on the school board. His stated goals is straight out of the republican talking points “I want to give parents a voice in the decisions that will impact their child’s education because I know what it’s like to have to fight for the educational needs of my own child,”. Parents have a voice. They have always had a voice. What Lauzon is referring to is a voice of the extreme far right that wants to ban books, ban the gay community, and ban anything that doesn’t adhere to his party of perverted “family values”.

Make no mistake about this. Lauzon will bring his perverted values and extreme right wing politics into the board. CCISD doesn’t need partisan politics from any political party.