Over the past few years, Lubbock ISD has been steadily moving away from the idea of neighborhood elementary schools, rather choosing to close many existing elementary school facilities and construct new, larger schools at a hefty cost to the taxpayer and a heavier expense of the educational quality of young LISD students.

Rather than having schools easily accessible to parents and kids in some neighborhoods, the district has chosen to close many of those schools which offered convenience and smaller class sizes for students, rather opting for new super-schools which offer expensive new buildings for the administration to play with and sizable classrooms in which to cram a multitude of students, likely to the chagrin of the overburdened teacher.

We already have a cash-strapped district (whose school board also chose to give the superintendent a raise amid whining about the lack of funding), and vacant former neighborhood elementary schools around the city, and more will close as the new larger schools are built with funds from the recent bond election, which only garnered a tiny majority, especially considering the prior rubber-stamping given by Lubbock voters.

This is also a bit counterproductive toward the nationwide grousing over how fat our nation’s youth are. As we continue to move away from the neighborhood elementary school, it is becoming less feasible for the older children to walk home from school, missing out on some much-needed exercise.

The new densely populated elementary schools also make the classroom learning experience less personalized for the children, because a teacher will not be able to pay the same amount of attention to every student when trying to do their best to teach forty students, as compared to twenty to thirty.

While this may be fine for older students in middle and high schools, elementary school students are more likely to need individualized instruction. These new jam-packed classrooms deprive the young students of the luxury of adequate attention from their instructor, giving the taxpayers less bang for their buck as far as educating their children.

Lubbock ISD has much to be proud of, as far as having many excellent instructors and access to great technology, but Frenship and Lubbock-Cooper ISDs are wonderful as well, can offer more personalized instruction which Lubbock ISD teachers will soon be too strapped to offer. If parents are already going to have to travel out of the way to take their children to school, choosing Frenship or Lubbock-Cooper schools for a youth’s education makes more sense.

Lubbock ISD is a good school district, but their board of trustees and bond committee have helped to sacrifice the quality of education given to their students, all for big, pretty new schools for their administration to toy around with. Irresponsible decisions like these show where the district administration's loyalties lie, and it’s certainly not with their students.

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