Do you believe it is possible that the Federal Government has ever misled or lied to the public?
Do you believe it is possible that your local Government has ever misled or lied to the public?
Do you believe it is possible that your Cleburne ISD School Administration (or any school administration for that matter) has ever misled or lied to the public?
If your answer to all or any of these questions is 'NO', then I have some bad news for you. Our Federal, State, and local governments and school bureaucracies are not made up of monks whose main purpose in life is to maintain transparency and honesty in their inner workings. All of these entities are made up of real people, who have ego's, who have stress and issues and baggage just like all the rest of us, and like a lot of humans, when given a position of power over someone else, there is a fairly good chance they will abuse their position.
There was a saying by a gal that was the State Comptroller a few years ago, Carole Keeton Strayhorn I believe, and it goes like this.. 'Here in Texas, we're going to keep voting on it until you get it right.' That applies so well to what Texas schools do when the voters turn down a large school bond. They start all over the next year, and just keep hammering away.
Right now, Cleburne is into Year Two of the 'Big Cleburne School Bond Boondoggle', because the whole thing is essentially a fraud. Last time around, Cleburne was told that, for $150 Million Dollars, Cleburne could have a nice, shiny, new Football Stadium, you know, 'For the kids!', and that it would drastically improve the quality of life in Cleburne. Pardon my French, but that is bullshit, and the taxpayers of Cleburne thought so too, because they voted it down, but just barely, because out of 17,000 property owners, only a couple thousand voted on both sides of the issues.
So here are, again, except that this time, the school administration is promoting a new high school, you know, 'For the kids!', except that... it isn't.
If you google 'Texas School Bond Fraud', there are quite a few articles that come up about it, and the crux of this process is that with access to tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on a big project, and NO OVERSIGHT, it is possible for anyone involved with expenditures in the project the bond was raised for, to embezzle money. And embezzle they do! Texas isn't the only state this happens in, and there are some school systems where up to 70 Million Dollars just disappeared, such as Beaumont, Texas ISD. Folks, that isn't white collar crime, that's a bank robbery.
The only way to keep these things from happening is to have the smallest bond possible on the smallest project possible, with the most oversight possible. Right now Cleburne ISD is failing on all three counts. First and foremost, the school administration keeps screaming that the high school is out of room, and the hallways are unsafely crowded, and it just impacts education so badly... that is all a lie. Go ask the administration about the studies done on Cleburne growth over the next decade. Go to the school board meetings and ask 'em which one of them did walkthroughs with a clipboard to count heads and classrooms. Both processes came up to the same result. It'll be ten years before the high school runs out of room.
Now, what is needed is a lot of repair to Cooke and Coleman schools, because, there's hearsay bouncing around that the football program kept robbing the maintenance program from these schools, and they repeatedly ended up short when they needed to do repairs. Funny though, I never hear of the football program coming up short... Regardless, we are where we are, and on the yesmatterscisd website, they state that they can fix Cooke and Coleman for only $2.5 Million. Great! Let's a get a bond for that and be done.
But oh no! That's too small a dollar amount to easily embezzle funds from, so now we've got a new high school and a rebuild of the existing high school tagged on there as well. Here's the problem. Sure, they call it a new high school, but look at the layout plans right there on the school or bond website. They're not building just a new high school, they are building a new SPORTSPLEX as well. New baseball fields, new track, new locker rooms on either side of the general use building at the end of the football field.. that suspiciously look like home and away team lockers, prior to building .... a new football stadium.
It's right there on the pictures folks. They may scream that it's all about the high school, but it isn't. For some reason some people in Texas think that having a big football stadium is a measure of the worth of it's students. It isn't. Nobel Prize winners are the measure of your school, and the way things are going, I don't see too many of those coming out of Cleburne ISD.
So here your administration is, pushing a new high school, with no mention of the SPORTS PLEX they are going to build with it, with locker rooms that look like they're setting up to build a new football stadium right there by the high school.
All of it unnecessary, none of it that will help the education of, you know, the KIDS, and all of it a SCAM to have access to large amounts of money, with NO OVERSIGHT, because your school board is asleep at the wheel. Go to the school board meetings and watch how often they discuss school finances. They don't. Look through the minutes, they're so vague they could be holding drunken college parties in there and you'd never know it from the minutes.
Vote NO on the 2016 Cleburne ISD School Bond. It is NOT for the kids, as a pile of bricks never made a bit of difference in the education of a kid, and a new SPORTS PLEX is not going to help that either.
Did you know that at the beginning of this school year, when tested, MOST of the incoming 9th graders were reading at a 6th grade level? Until you can fix THAT, no one needs to be spending millions of dollars on a new, going to stay mostly empty for ten years, un-needed school, or a SPORTS PLEX.
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