The Two Room Schoolhouse

A historical marker stands near the Holt School in Hutchinson County. Now used as a community center, this two-room schoolhouse near one of our farms in the Texas Panhandle stands as a reminder of our heritage and a symbol of the past. In 1935, the students stopped attending Holt School and instead attended the public high school in nearby Spearman, which could provide those students with better educational opportunities.

As Texas Governor Greg Abbott pushes for a universal voucher program for Texas students, rural parents like myself fear we are taking a step back in time toward the two-room schoolhouse and a step back in the improvements in educational opportunities for our students.  

The reality of educating rural students is different from educating students in suburban and urban areas—it always has been. Even with the onset of technology, we do not have the same ability to access resources, our costs per student are higher because of our lower enrollment numbers, and we struggle to recruit teachers and administrators to work in our communities.

We don’t have the same problems facing urban and suburban districts with their “woke” issues because our friends and neighbors lead our schools.  We stay involved, and we believe in a shared value system.  Rural schools are places where there is shared trust between parents, teachers, administrators, school board members, and students.  And while we aren’t without our problems, we know our community's strength is tied to our school's strength, so we look for local solutions, not government intervention.  

Abbott’s crusade in Texas against public schools and teachers is unconscionable.  And the campaign to pit families and Republican voters against their local schools with propaganda and lies is beyond reproach.   

Despite the claims by the pro-voucher lobby and the out-of-state PACs, the fight in Texas is not over.   The governor needs 76 votes to move forward with a voucher bill, but he is not there yet.  Despite spending upwards of $7M, he won outright ten seats with pro-voucher candidates. The Raney vote signaled that 63 members supported vouchers, meaning there would need to be 13 votes flipped. There are four incumbents in runoffs and two run-offs in challenger seats, so of those six pending, the Governor would need to win three by my count. Plus, in November must hold on to every marginal seat the Democrats challenge him on.  Abbott told a Conservative group this week he needed two, but he also boldly told those same groups vouchers would pass last session.

The Republican urban elites are pushing a narrative against public schools, which is driven by big money, think tanks, and out-of-state interests.  Their goal has been to devalue public schools by promoting outrage against them and making those stories go viral.  

Despite what these pro-voucher folks would claim, there is no school choice movement afoot in Texas. In fact, school choice is not even a part of the conversation, and Abbott won these victories simply because they ran well-funded, slanderous campaigns against incumbents coupled with a last-minute Trump endorsement.  

Our community schools support the economies of our small towns.  The problems of larger urban schools are not our problems, and the solutions proposed by elitist urban politicians are not our solutions. Rural schools need access to more resources, not less, and it is inevitable that a move towards vouchers will impact the resources available.

I was recently told by a former colleague who lives in Dallas proper and likely works out of a high-rise building that I should give it up, believe their polls, and get off of “my high horse.”  I told him my high horse would be the best place to raise some hell.  

A state-supported Public Education System is fundamental to who we are as Texans, and our founders fought over the centuries to ensure that education opportunities would be available to all parts of Texas and all students in Texas. 

In rural communities, the two-room schoolhouse is our past, not our future. Our ability to send our students to larger public community schools has resulted in educational and job opportunities for our students that we may not have had otherwise.  Now is not the time for Texas Republicans to abandon our heritage and commitment to public education.   A voucher program's impact will drain the resources available in our public education system, which will most certainly leave an already forgotten rural Texas behind.

(The Holt School in Hutchinson County, Texas, is a two-room schoolhouse constructed in 1916. Regular school classes were held here until 1935, when students began attending school in the nearby town of Spearman. The building remains a community gathering place and continues to serve as an election polling place.)