Trustees should represent the needs and wishes of our community, organize to ensure that every student in AISD gets a top notch education, ensure that the community is clearly and consistently informed, and make sure that teachers at every campus feel supported to do the best work they can. The role of the teachers cannot be overstated and support for teachers to do their best work is key to student success. All decisions a trustee makes must come down to how the student experience is affected. We are in a very difficult time in AISD, the state, and honestly beyond. A trustee can advocate beyond the AISD school board to try to make systemic changes that will support Austin students.

I come from a family of teachers, my parents, aunts, and uncles were all teachers and administrators. I spent sixteen years as a high school English teacher, including eleven years at Crockett High School in District 6, and was honored to be named Austin ISD Teacher of the Year in 2013. I later worked as an AISD Technology Design Coach, supporting teachers across South Austin, and I now teach future teachers at The University of Texas at Austin. Throughout my career, I’ve centered student voices and advocated for the professionalism and expertise of teachers.

I also know AISD as a parent. My children have attended AISD schools from kindergarten through high school. I’ve served on numerous AISD committees focused on issues including literacy, teacher pay, technology, and academic offerings and I bring the perspective of a teacher, a parent, and someone who has spent a career working to make public education better.

If the state takes over the district, Austinites will lose their say in how our schools are run and the role of the Trustee becomes perhaps even more significant, since they must keep the community informed. It is likely that any changes made by the state would be presented to the public as positive and effective. This means that a Trustee must maintain deep ties with the school communities by listening to teachers, students, parents and advocacy groups so that we can organize push back when the reality doesn’t match the messaging. Our schools belong to Austinites and even without the power to vote on the board, Trustees should remain true community representatives, organizers, and conduits for effective and transparent communication.

Retaining great teachers starts with making teaching a career that people can realistically build a life around. That means competitive pay, manageable workloads, meaningful support, opportunities to grow, and feeling like your experience and expertise are valued. Part of that means being thoughtful about where we place beginning teachers and what we ask them to take on. I want to make sure that new teachers receive consistent and meaningful mentorship. Then as their careers progress, we should create opportunities for excellent teachers to grow, mentor others, and have a meaningful voice in instructional decisions without having to leave the classroom.

Austin ISD needs to become a district that families actively choose. We need to make our neighborhood schools places families want to be by offering strong academics, excellent teachers, arts and athletics, career programs, special education, dual language programs and extracurricular opportunities. AISD has many of these strengths already, and is also already trying to combat declining enrollment in some creative ways, but we need to know more about why parents are leaving, decide which of those reasons are within the control of the district, and actively work to make changes accordingly. We also need to consider how processes already in place, like the redrawing of boundaries, will lead to strong, sustainable schools with programming that the community is asking for.

The most important challenge of balancing the budget going forward is to mitigate the direct impact on students. I know that is much easier said than done, but our budget must protect the classroom, prioritizing teachers and students over administrative overhead. We need a multi-year budgeting process where we look at how the cost-savings of our choices play out over time, and we need to communicate that to the public. We also need to advocate at the state level for a change to per-student funding and the recapture formula. While AISD certainly plays a role in our current budget situation, we did not get here all alone. Educating the public as to how funding works, how the state structure is impacting their students’ education, and encouraging more advocacy beyond AISD also has to be a part of the plan.

Austin's public schools can't really be separated from Austin's history. The racial divisions created through redlining and other discriminatory housing policies helped shape the crescent of communities that stretches along I35, and those patterns of where people could live had a direct impact on where children went to school.

Austin's history with school desegregation is complicated, too. AISD was slow to desegregate and eventually used court-ordered busing. For many Black families, integration meant losing important community institutions, including L.C. Anderson High School, Austin's only Black public high school. When AISD eventually returned to neighborhood schools, the housing patterns created by decades of segregation meant that many of those schools became segregated again in different ways.

This history helps explain why some communities may not automatically trust AISD. Those feelings didn't come from nowhere. Decisions made decades ago affected people's neighborhoods, schools, and opportunities, and some of those effects are still with us.

So what should AISD do about it today? First, we listen. Families and communities that have historically been most affected by district decisions need to be involved before decisions are made—not brought in after the fact. That is especially important when we are talking about school closures, boundaries, programs, facilities, or how resources are distributed.

To me, academic growth means more than just STAAR scores. While the test scores are what matter for state accountability, a STAAR score alone is not an indicator of success or failure. I want to measure all aspects of a student’s education. We should break the data down to see who is and is not succeeding, and then use the pockets of success to learn what is working so that we can spread those practices. If a school is struggling, we need to understand more about why, without blaming the students or teachers. Talking directly to teachers on those campuses about their experiences would be the best way to get data that is real and actionable.

My top priority would be to use all of my experience and expertise to make sure that every child in AISD receives a high quality education from a teacher who feels supported and excited about their work. I want all AISD students to feel challenged, supported and seen when they go to school each day, and their teachers to feel the same.