Highlights from our interview with Aaron Silva, parent of two and founder of Texas Education Project 103
Lone Star Standard: What is happening with teacher attrition in Eanes and other school districts in Texas?
Silva: At the curriculum level there has been, for some reason, this concerted effort to diminish the percentage of time that teachers spend actually teaching reading, writing, arithmetic. And, there’s all these other things that have entered into the conversation between teachers and students, between teachers and parents, the administration and parents. It’s gotten to a point where it’s become a big distraction.
As a result, we have these employees, these incredible teachers who do it for the love, not for the money, but at the end of the day they should be paid properly. When they’re hired, they’re hired to be a teacher. But over time, all of these other requirements are added on to them. They’re a mental health therapist. They’re dodging bullets now. They’re being trained in the art of D.E.I. and all of this just compounds more and more focus on the outcomes of state tests, like MAP and STARR.
And, so, we have these employees that are paid a certain wage, say $60 or $65,000 per year when they start and 3 or 4 or 5 years later, they’re doing much, much more than they were ever asked to do at the beginning. So, as a result, they feel underpaid. And that’s part of the reason we have this high attrition rate floating around 20%.
In any business, when you’re turning over staff by 20%, a lot of continuity is lost. You lose your mentors. You lose the culture that’s inculcated into the teaching curriculum. And as a result, quality goes down. And that’s what’s been going on. That’s sort of the primary issue.
Lone Star Standard: What do you think is the major reason your school district, Eanes ISD, is facing challenges?
Silva: Well, the reason the ship has been steered where it has is really a lack and absence of leadership at the board level. I think for the history of schools, you have a really well-intentioned, community-organized group of folks, these school boards. But, in recent years, it has become so complicated that we really don’t have the intellectual capital, the business acumen, the people that really know how to make hard decisions.
When I looked at the board of trustees, to this day, there’s nobody that has ever signed the front of a payroll check. So, they’re not wired to think like business people. And that’s the kind of thinking that schools all across Texas need to create an environment where smart people, good people with business acumen will actually step forward and step into leadership positions to steer the ship in the right direction.
Eanes, where my kids go to school, has a massive deficit situation, dropping their reserves to less than 25% in the imminent future. They are in financial straits and it has nothing to do with the state. It has everything to do with, at least in this school district, the board of trustees have just allowed the ship to drift to where it’s at.
Expenses have been going up and up and up. Revenue has been going down and down and down because our population has been shrinking. We can talk more about that but here we are. And, now, they’re in panic mode because they weren’t prepared or had the experience to make tough decisions for years. And we’re in a tough spot, and I know a lot of other districts are as well.
Lone Star Standard: What is Peak Eanes and what are the implications of that research?
Silva: The big mess they’ve had is something I call ‘Peak Eanes.’ I did a research piece during my campaign where I looked at our population and looked at our student population, and what I was able to predict was quite simple academically. We have about 7,600 students today when back in 2015, we had 8,500 students. And so we’ve declined to 7,600 students.
And I tried to understand why we’re graduating about 700 seniors a year but only about 400 kindergartners are coming in. So we have a deficit of 300. And, it’s been there for years. And that’s because here in Eanes, people are not moving out. They’re staying here for the remainder of their lives. And young people are not moving in because it’s too expensive. And so we have this deficit.
And what the school has been doing for years has been really leaning on transfer students. And what I predicted is coming true, that in 10 years we’ll have a population of about 5,500 or 6,000 students. We are dealing with a government entity, like Eanes, they do not want to get smaller. And so what they should have been doing is studying the population, saying that we’re not going to have more and more students and shrinking the population and shrinking the expenses. But they don’t want to do that.
What they tried to do is make it up with transfers that they bring in from other school districts. Today, I think we have about 800 transfers, something like that. And the issue is that if your student population drops down to 5,500, as I predicted, and you still want to have a school district of 8,000, you’re going to need 2,500 students from outside the district.
That may not be a big deal at first glance. But again, if you take it one step further, and this is where Eanes has really messed up, we need to raise somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion, maybe more than $1 billion, to refurbish all of our schools, because we’re one of the oldest school districts in Texas. The question to taxpayers is going to be, if you’re paying on bonds, are you willing to raise $500 million or over $1 billion in debt, bond debt, knowing that a third of your population, the transfer students and their families are not carrying that bond debt with you? Who’s going to vote for that bond? And, that puts us in a tough situation.
Lone Star Standard: Are you pursuing legislative fixes to any of these issues?
Silva: That’s what I’m trying to change. I want to, after I’ve learned what you actually go through as a candidate and seeing 4 or 5 other really smart people, good people here in our community in previous elections, just get character assassinated. I’m really committed to trying to create an environment where I can answer that question, where we have fair and ethical elections. So, I’m really committed to that right now.
I’ve got a 4 or 5 pronged program or strategy in our community to clear a space for people to enter into the race without having to be worried about being harassed. I’ve got, as you may or may not know, a lawsuit currently against my opponent for some awful things that they did during the election. I’m spending some time up at the state House and meeting with legislators and their staff, talking about improving the CFCP. I don’t know if you have heard of this before.
It’s kind of interesting. It’s called the Code of Fair Campaign Practices. Every candidate is required to sign it. It’s something that the Texas Ethics Commission issued some years ago. And if you don’t sign it, you’re kind of chastised for not signing it so everyone signs it. There are things like, ‘I will conduct my campaign openly and publicly and limit personal attacks. I’ll not use character defamation or whisper campaigns, libel or slander, negative prejudice.’ It goes on and on. All the things that an ethical person would do are on this document that is signed by the candidate.
And then what I learned, it’s meaningless. It has absolutely no teeth. My opponents broke every single thing on it. Everything on the list. And there’s no recourse. There’s no penalty. There’s no suffering. There’s no violation of a law, nothing. And so I’m dragging this up to the state to say, look, it’s time that we improve this. We have to improve this so that if something is violated, the only option to a parent is not going and filing a million dollar lawsuit like I had to do in this instance.
There has to be more there to give good people confidence that not only is the candidate going to act properly but everyone who works for their campaign is going to act properly. And, when you live in a world of social media and, in my case, they stood up these anonymous Instagram accounts and they did this to other candidates in years past. They do horrible things and there’s nothing you can do about it.
So, I want to see the gap narrowed. I want to see those control edges better defined so parents can step forward knowing that everyone is going to act properly. And this is especially important for local elections. It may be different at the state level or at the federal level. Of course, it’s a dog eat dog world. But down here in these local, nonpartisan elections where you really need intellectual capital to do great things for students and teachers, we can’t keep putting up with these practices.
Aaron Silva is a parent of two children, former candidate for Eanes ISD School Board, lifelong entrepreneur, and founder of Paladin-fs, a professional technology contract negotiation company for community banks and credit unions. He is also the founder of Texas Education Project 103.
This interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Listen to the full discussion here: https://texas-talks.simplecast.com/episodes/ep-40-aaron-silva.
