It’s not cheap to change the names of Austin schools named for confederate figures.
The Austin Independent School District is taking donations from the public to offset the cost of renaming schools with ties to the Confederacy. Dr Kazique Prince of the East Austin Coalistion for Quality Education says people in the community want to chip in to this effort. “I think it’s a good effort but I don’t think it changes the school district’s responsibility to make sure these things happen as smoothly as possible.”
Austin ISD estimates it costs around sixty grand per school. The AISD Board approved five schools for name changes and now they’re asking the public for donations to offset those costs. Prince says changing names does not mean the end of change. “By having this conversation about confederacy, it’s bringing attention to some of the challenges that the former school Lanier and other schools have been having. And now we can have a conversation about how do we support those schools in a way that we haven’t in the past?”
Prince worries about how transparent AISD will be with the renaming fund. “Because you don’t want to hear some story later on where people put money into something then find out later on it’s not going quite where we thought it was going or we had a misunderstanding. So, that kind of transparency can be really important, I think.”
The district hopes to raise around $322 thousand dollars for the costs of rebranding five schools named for confederate figures.
https://give.livingtree.com/c/austin-isd-school-renaming-fund_1
Checks can be mailed to:
Austin Ed Fund
1111 West Sixth Street, D300
Austin, Texas 78703
image courtesy AISD
