Southlake, Texas -Last night, the Carroll Independent School District (CISD) Board of Trustees voted 5 to 1 to not renew membership with the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB).
“I applaud the Southlake Carroll Board of Trustees for their leadership,” said Patriot Mobile Action Executive Director, Leigh Wambsganss. “Texas parents’ tax dollars should not be funding TASB’s broken and woke bureaucracy that is not looking out for the best interests of children. I hope this is just the beginning of school districts across Texas leaving TASB and becoming truly independent districts that focus on quality education.”
The CISD resolution states the reasoning for non-renewing its TASB membership includes:
TASB taking eight months to announce the end of its membership with the National School Boards Association (NSBA) after their 2021 letter equating parents’ school board involvement to domestic terrorism and hate crimes,
TASB’s divisive political ideologies used in training and conferences for school district administrators and board members,
The services provided by TASB are readily available on the free market, and
CISD, as a taxing authority, having a fiduciary responsibility to its taxpayers.
In last night’s meeting, CISD Board Chairman Cam Bryan said, “to continue sending our community’s taxpayer dollars to an organization that pushes the very ideology that our community specifically and overwhelmingly rejected at the ballot box in May ’21, November ’21 and then again in May ’22, would be disingenuous at the very least to those that have entrusted us to represent them.”
Trustee Eric Lannen said he has attended TASB functions and ‘knows for a fact’ that TASB advocates for Robinhood (also called Recapture), a program that is wrought with controversy and lack of transparency. Over 600 Texas districts receive recapture funds from wealthier districts, but there’s no proof that money is helping education in poor districts. In fact, there is a great deal of proof that it is not. Look no further than the $20 million water park in the La Joya Independent School District in South Texas.
“We paid 33 million dollars into (Robinhood) recapture last year and next year it’s gonna be $37-million,” Eric Lannen said in last night’s meeting. “We are basically participating in paying money to TASB so that they can advocate to take money away from our district.”
School board associations across the country came under scrutiny after the September 2021 NSBA letter to President Biden. In this letter, the NSBA accused parents of domestic terrorism and hate crimes for simply using their first amendment rights to advocate for their children at school board meetings. In the letter, the NSBA specifically solicited the United States DOJ, FBI, and the Secret Service, as well as multiple other federal agencies, to use the Patriot Act to criminalize concerned parents.
In December 2021, the Republican Party of Texas (RPT) announced the RPT “firmly believes that local Independent School Districts (ISD) should sever their ties with TASB in order to protect Texas children and the voices of parents.”
It was not until two weeks after a wave of May 7, 2022, conservative school board election victories across Texas, that TASB finally announced, on May 23, 2022, the end of its membership in NSBA. TASB, however, continued its woke ideologies.
On January 30, 2023, nine Republican Texas State Representatives sent a letter to all Texas school boards asking them to immediately leave TASB. The letter says that remaining in TASB forces tax dollars to be weaponized against taxpayers, their values, and their children.
“In Texas, there are a lot of people and organizations grifting millions of dollars in the name of education, who truly do not care about children or their education,” said Wambsganss. “It is time to hold them accountable and get back to providing the next generation of this country’s leaders with a quality education in Texas.”
Founded in January 2022, Patriot Mobile Action engages on the front lines, researching issues and candidates and independently advocates on behalf of those who will stand for Christian conservative values.
Comments