New Home ISD has officially decided that its Special Education students are more like cargo than community members. On February 9, the Board of Trustees voted to shutter the local Life Skills classroom and “shuttle” the five affected students to O’Donnell ISD—a lovely 30-mile trek one way. The district claims this is just a return to the “old ways” of using a shared services agreement, mostly because they didn’t want to foot the bill for their own teacher and paraprofessional once the regional co-op stopped paying for them.
The logic here is peak Lubbock-area absurdity: the district apparently has plenty of cash for a $250,000 field house and a brand-new volleyball program, but when it comes to keeping four or five local kids in their home district, the piggy bank is suddenly empty. Superintendent Julia Stephen even referred to the $181,999 cost of these services as “maintenance fees” in a public statement—because nothing says “we value our students” like comparing them to the cost of fixing a leaky roof or mowing the stadium turf.
Parents were notified of this life-altering decision via impersonal phone calls and voicemails, with some claiming they weren’t even given the “common courtesy” of a notice that a vote was happening. While the school board sits in their “brand new board room” discussing “fiscal responsibility,” moms like Preslea Thompson and Lexy Castro are left wondering why their children are being singled out and sent on a 60-mile daily round trip just to receive the basic education they are legally entitled to.
It’s heartening to see New Home ISD teaching these kids the most important West Texas lesson of all: you’re never too young to learn that in this town, if you aren’t carrying a pigskin or a volleyball, you’re just “maintenance.”