Don Rogers, Executive Director of the Texas Rural Education Association, and Wayne Pierce, Executive Director of the Equity Center, Hold a Conversation
Equity Center Radio |September 10, 2010 | The Executive Director of the Texas Rural Education Association, Don Rogers, Explains to Wayne Pierce, the Equity Center’s Executive Director and Today’s Host of Equity Center Radio, the Unique Problems Facing Texas’s Rural Schools.
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The Texas Rural Education Association (TREA), was founded in 1991 to provide legislative representation at both the state and national level and to assist rural schools in meeting the distinctive needs facing rural schools in attempting to educate the students in their care.
Rural schools have diminished in numbers over the years and legislation has come to ignore the needs of those schools and their students. TREA’s Executive Director, Don Rogers, describes to Wayne Pierce, the Executive Director of the Equity Center and today’s program host, about the overwhelming needs facing his members. He explains that Title 1, the main score of federal funding to assist school districts with the education of disadvantaged students, is, now, unfairly distributed so that the low-poverty large, urban districts obtain more federal dollars than the high-poverty smaller school districts.
Don also describes the concern of small, rural districts with the way in which text book supplements are distributed. Most textbook publishers provide FREE supplementary instructional materials to school districts that order a minimum of 20 texts. Since many of TREA’s members’ schools have classes far below 20 pupils in size, they have had to purchase unnecessary texts or pay for the supplements, a financial burden that larger districts do not have to endure.
Don Rogers
Today’s guest has been a career educator since graduating from Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, with a B.S. in Education, in 1959. He obtained a M.S. in School Administration in 1965, from Texas A&M-Kingsville, and, in 1981, received his Ed.D. from Western Colorado University. He served as Superintendent at Eanes ISD from 1974 until 1991. Thereafter, he served as Executive Director of the Texas Association of Community Schools (1991-2002), as a consultant on public education, for Strategic Partnerships, Inc. (2002-2007), and as a legislative consultant on public education from 2002-2008. In 2006 he became the Executive Director of TREA, where he is currently employed.
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We are the only education association in Texas which exclusively represents the interests of low and mid-wealth (Tier 2) school districts, whose access to state and local funds for operations and facilities is significantly less than that enjoyed by other districts.
Founded in 1982, the Equity Center is the largest research and advocacy organization of its kind in the nation.
Today, about 90% of all Texas students attend school in the 900+ districts eligible for regular membership in the Equity Center. To be eligible, a district must receive Tier 2 funding.
Whether researching or developing policy alternatives, “crunching numbers” for a multitude of finance proposals, testifying before legislative committees, making presentations to school groups across the state, or working with state agencies, the Equity Center concentrates all of its energy on improving the financial status of our school districts.