Sherrie Matula Educates Bloggers on Education

We had a blogswarm (or as Kuffner sometimes calls it, a gang blog) conference call with Sherrie Matula, running for HD-129 recently. Sherrie is running against an incumbent who has never campaigned and is acting like a non-candidate (probably because he doesn't want to run on his sorry record.) Sherrie, on the other hand, has 25 years experience as an educator, including serving two terms on the Clear Creek ISD school board and is someone we all must rally around in order to bring much need leadership on education to the Texas House.

The photo is of Sherrie holding court with Fort Bend area teachers at the Response to the DeLay Tribute event held in Sugar Land on Saturday. Sherrie's district emcompasses the southern end of Harris County - Pasadena, Clear Lake, LaPorte, Seabrook, Friendswood, Webster and Sagemont. But, us TX-22ers stick together, particularly since some of us are represented by Charlie Howard. We have to find a legislator who will adopt us and I've picked Sherrie and it appears some other forward thinking Fort Bend citizens have made the same good choice.

Sherrie told us about the four "super pennies" school districts have the chance to add to their property tax rates in 06-07 without going to the voters. This is important, as this will count against recapture for districts that are in that situation, thereby offering the districts "free money" from the state. In 07-08, school districts have the opportunity to add two cents to the property tax rate without going to the voters, with the same great deal on recapture. After, that, school districts have to go to the voters for all property tax increases. So, there is a short, but valuable opportunity now for school boards to vote in a small property tax increase to benefit schools. This is an incredibly important issue as HB-1 mandated many new things to schools, most of them unfunded. The new high school initiatives that were funded, like the four years of math and science, were woefully underfunded. With rising costs to operate schools, such as fuel and electricity, the need to increase teacher pay, the necessity to improve facilities, etc. schools are going to be faced with tremendous budget crises within two short years. Some districts will already see huge budget short falls in 06-07, even with voting in the four cents. Other districts are forgoing the four super pennies, as school board members perhaps choose political gain (not wanting to raise property taxes before going before the voters for re-election) above the needs of the school children in their district.

I'll blog more in other posts on what we learned from Sherrie. The legislation out of the recent special session wasn't all about property tax reduction. There are some serious implications for school districts, schools and the classroom teacher that have the potential to cause a quick downhill slide in our education system in Texas. The way we can stop that is to get some new legislators in the House in January and Sherrie Matula should be on the top of everyone's list.

We had other Texas House candidates in on the call - Chad Khan, Diane Trautman and Ellen Cohen. They are terrific, also, and worthy of our support. More on them later.

Go to Brains and Eggs for a great wrap-up of the conference call.
UPDATE: Others in the blogosphere chime in with posts about Sherrie: Stace at Dos Centavos and Kuffner at Off the Kuff. Vince mentions the call in his fabulous From the Blogs on Capitol Annex. And Lyn at Houston Democrats chimes in. Bay Area Houston was in on the call and adds this.