This makes me so mad! My kids attend school in a “rich” school district and they have to charge material fees for most high school classes (usually about $20-$30 a class) some times you need to purchase “notes” or lab books and things like orchestra is $200 a semester. It really adds up! The community has had to make a separate “educational foundation” that raises private money year round to pay for teachers and support staff and even classroom furniture because the state takes so much away in “robin hood” taxes. Recently there was a big battle because the educational foundation was selling ads to local businesses to put on the sides of school buses and the state thought the privately raised money should be included in the robin hood money.
I can assure you our “rich” school district doesn’t have a water park! Heck we don’t even have a pool!
Perhaps the water park is considered an investment to generate even more money on a continuing basis. It may be able to generate dollars from outside the community rather than relying on its residents.
Ideally every school district would have a pool for athletics. I live in a poorer large school district and there is one school that does have a planetarium, too. I’m seen some of the school facilities in poorer school districts in TX - some of the schools look like prison buildings. The water park does seem to be getting more of the attention in this “educational and athletic complex.” http://www.lajoyaisd.com/achievement/ljisd-sports-learning-complex/
But the point is they are taking money from large school district like Huston and Austin because they are “rich” school districts to fund their county club facilities. These are large school districts that have several inter city schools that have builings that are falling apart and have over crowed classes yet the state is taking money away from them to give to school districts that are “poor” to build a water park? Our own district has to fund raise to to pay for teachers because the state takes so much money and gives it to others.
I highly doubt that this will generate any income, in fact I doubt it would generate enough income to cover maintance and opperating costs, let alone liability insurance. And reading up more on this school district, they own a golf course too!
This reads much more like a venting op-ed than investigative journalism.
I’d love for my neighboring poor school districts to get a center like that. Those in my school district can afford to drive and use facilities wherever. They don’t have that luxury.
I’ve yet to find a ‘waterpark’ article that wasn’t all about the headline. There’s typically zero investigation into these.
In this case, sounds like an investment. Perhaps not the one we’d have made but they probably figured it’d generate money while providing a pool to teach kids to swim (something poorer kids can’t do, at worrying levels). A pool on its own wouldnt generate any money and still costs a lot to manage.
As for the bigger point: The idea is that rich districts’ families typically offset what’s missing, with books, private lessons, club sports - which is impossible in poor districts (ie., Raising money is just not possible, club sports are not possible, etc).
However I overall agree that the state of Texas should fund its schools better so that overcrowded classrooms and lack of facilities should not be a problem anywhere, and money generated or raised should only go to extras.
You’re welcome to go use it. It’s open to the public and as far as I can tell it’s $5 for children and $8 for adults. It looks like they have a snack bar and are giving job opportunities to students as well.
As far as your area “paying for it” that the complexity of the issue in states like TX where there is no state income tax yet the state has a constitutional responsibility for educating ALL children. You wind up with a “Robin Hood” system of school funding as most revenue in the state is derived from property taxes. That tax structure has its pros and cons.
I can imagine a lot of benefits to school children from the facility as described.
I work in a low income district, whereby I have 7th graders who don’t know how to swim. The ocean is 20 minutes away! How can you not know how to survive in the water??
When I’ve asked students why they didn’t take lessons at their public pools, they told me their parents couldn’t afford the $40 fees for summer swim lessons.
When I’ve done home visits, most of my students live in apartments, with pools and without AC and can’t use the pools. The families won’t use the pools because of a myriad of problems including maintenance and the inability to swim, both the children and their parents.
Yes, my own kiddos attended our very wealthy school district, and both my husband and I “(w)itched” and complained about the fees for: sports and EC’s, mandatory music fees (and mandatory parent “volunteering” in high school).
However, for our own kids, their “educational expenses” came first and foremost in our family.
I must give props to our district.
Our school district was equitable for the “low income schools”, on the other side of the district, by providing exceptional facilities and services. They had car dealerships and other donors from the engineering business park, sponsor school supplies, sports programs, busing, swim lessons at the schools, etc.
Water park? More power to them. Gives the kids a sense of empowerment and confidence, just by learning how to swim: accomplishing a goal and maybe saving someone else’s life.
I think what gives me most pause is that the water park (not a pool, a water park with a lazy river and curly slides and sprinklers), indoor pool and planetarium were financed fully out of the existing school budget. There was no need for a bond because apparently LJISD had $20 million sitting in their reserve fund to pay it outright.
The gist of the matter is this,
La Joya gets 75% of its funding straight from the state of Texas. Houston gets 35%. If I were a Houston taxpayer I’d be seriously irritated that I was paying for a boondoggle like this for another community.
This sounds like a normal property tax. NYS schools are funded by property tax too. Our taxes go to the state, and the state decides how much each district gets for the next school year. Labeling them “Robin Hood” taxes is inflammatory and divisive. No wonder poorer districts are taking steps to become more self-sufficient.
I don’t understand what you want poorer districts to do. It apparently makes you unhappy that they don’t make enough to support themselves, and when one takes steps to generate income you don’t like that either. Nearly 75% of their money in 2013 (the year planning began) came from the state. Only 9% came from local funds, and over 90% of the students are considered economically disadvantaged. That’s not “poor,” it’s Poor. This is a district totally at the mercy of the state. I think it was prudent to save and invest in something that will generate income.
The La Joya assistant superintendent disagrees with you. I assume they know more about their budget than you do.
Maybe La Joya ISD is really efficiently managed and has great administrators compared to other school districts. Maybe they know how to get bang for their buck as more experienced teachers and higher graduation rates might indicate. :-?
Well, in a school district with rock bottom standardized test scores, in which the vast majority of students are considered at risk for dropping out and most need ESL services, I can think of better ways for a school to spend resources if the school system objective is education. Public schools are having a hard enough time getting support from many members of the public; this really doesn’t help. My town has several such facilities. They do cost a fortune to insure and maintain.
My wealthy community put in a $10 million pool and fitness complex on the grounds of the high school. The school gave the land and the community paid for construction, half from a bond, half through private donations. The school system uses it for swim and dive practices but it’s also used year round by community members, who either pay on a per diem basis or sign up for (expensive) annual memberships. The pool is constantly in use, between adult swimmers, swim lessons, and recreational swimmers. Despite being well managed and supported by the community it has run a slight deficit for the past few years.
The costs to run such a facility are huge. The tiles peel, the filtration system breaks down, the dive well springs a leak. Every year money needs to be put aside for replacement costs.
I question the formula that allows a public school to bank the cash to put in and operate such a project. The district also owns a 27 hole golf course, the only school-owned course in the state of Texas.
@Sue22 - we may be neighbors, because that’s how it has worked here, too. The outdoor splash park and slides look very similar to the one pictured in TX and both it and the lap pools are very busy. We even have multiple competitive youth and adult swim teams that use the pool so often the schedule is fully booked. And even with all that, it runs at a deficit and they’re thinking of privatizing it or shutting it down because the costs to run exceed the income (which is generated by fees that are a lot higher than the $5 being charged in TX.)
Oh, and we also have a municipal golf course. It’s only 18 holes, not like the TX 27 hole one, but it runs at a loss as well. Even with all our tourists, retirees and snowbirds and fairly constant business, it’s operated at a loss for decades. Big community debate over whether to put more money into it or tear it out.
And this is a wealthy community with people who regularly patronize both the pool and golf course. If this tiny, poor TX community can run these operations at a profit, they should be giving seminars to teach their advanced techniques to the rest of the country.
The school my kids went to in California had a $40M sports complex. It was a private school. The swimming pool alone cost $10M - and it was outside.
That place was a money maker for the school, and it was run as a separate organization. The pool was rarely empty as it was rented out to other school swim teams, to masters swimmers, to private swim teams. There were 3-4 baseball diamonds, 2-3 soccer fields, even a golf pitch. You could drive by any time at night and weekends and there were teams there, paying rent to use the fields.
It’s pretty common for school districts to have a variety of funds to pull from. They may be called different things but they’re for things like capital improvements, emergencies, long-term planning, etc. Your own district likely has one. What you do with it is up to the voters in your district.
In 2013, 75% of La Joya’s funding came from the state. A couple years later it was up to 80%. This is a district totally at the mercy of state funding. How can the school plan if they don’t know how much the state will give them any given year? If TX residents are as resentful of funding poorer districts as it appears, the best chance low income districts have of being able to afford to focus on providing education to their students is to figure out a way to raise money. This district used money to make money. That’s smart.
Guess it depends on our experiences because I’d tend to view it as the opposite - this is a district that’s just tied itself to expensive facilities that will require expensive maintenance. Even those types of facilities that are fully paid for often can’t generate income to pay for their ongoing operations (as Sue and I described in our communities). So if for some reason this school district receives less public funding in the future, it’s stuck with these white elephants that will continue to deteriorate and need maintenance, operate at a loss. Sounds like more of a liability and dumb decision than a money making strategy.
And let’s be honest - how many of these school districts have remotely competent financial management? We really think this one district in a 90% poor area has financial genius that most of the other districts don’t have? Uh, I guess anything is possible. (Some things just aren’t probable.)