 |
| Nuestro Grupo's post-testimony group photo, Dec. 18, 2017 |
It went well for us in this past Monday evening at the school board level. You can hear our testimonies from the AISD-Vimeo website as follows:
Cori Salmeron—1:12:30
Angela Valenzuela—1:15:00
Emilio Zamora—1:17:49
We in Nuestro Grupo, the community-based organization that organizes the activities of Academia Cuauhtli —recoiled recently when we got word recently of school closures and consolidations of Eastside schools, including Sanchez, Metz, and Zavala. You can read about these terrible news here.
 |
| Me testifying. You can get the publication I'm holding HERE. |
To cut them back, to repurpose, to eliminate them is to erase historical memory beginning with the changing of the names like Spike Lee has recently commented on NPR regarding gentrification‘s impact on the soul of a community. It’s so sad—and for so many of us that have spent years working in and with these schools—enraging.
These are the ones that we as Nuestro Grupo work closely with through Academia Cuauhtli. We also draw children and families from Houston and Pérez elementary schools in Southeast Austin.
To add insult to injury, this was done right after the successful bond election where Trustee Dr. Ted Gordon’s conciliatory plea to the struggling and the dispossessed, to support a bond that even in its outlay was going to be inequitable. The sincerity of his plea and his expressed commitment to work toward equity actually encouraged me and many others to support the bond. Regardless of where things stood pre-bond election, he promised that everything was still going to be negotiable— which was the reason that he put forward to support the bond. Our deep respects, Dr. Gordon.
So I expressed some dismay with that and shared my research-based literature review on Grow Your Own Educators. N.B. Thanks to IDRA for giving me this opportunity to research, write, and publish this.
I also asked them to begin to take some notice of all of the amazing things that we are accomplishing. I guess we have been invisible.
Thankfully, the AISD Board and Superintendent Paul Cruz and Associate Superintendent Edmund Oropez have redoubled their commitment to work with us as a community.
We are invisible no longer, my friends. We are coming together! All of us. Everything on the table. There’s so many wonderful people in the district and in our community that we look forward to working with in the coming weeks and months.
All of it also sounds simultaneously fun, creative, and community-uplifting. We certainly have our hopes up! Sí se puede! Yes we can!
-Angela Valenzuela
READ CORI'S AND EMILIO'S EXCELLENT TESTIMONY BELOW
