“Why I Can No Longer Watch the Defunding of Our Schools”

By Freddie America

There are battles you can ignore when you’re young,

but life has a way of maturing your vision

until certain truths refuse to stay in the background.

For me, one truth has become impossible to ignore:

Our schools — the heart of every Texas town — are being slowly starved.

And I can no longer sit by and watch it.

We can call it “underfunding,”

“budget tightening,”

“local pressure,”

or “mandated constraints,”

but the reality feels much simpler to those who see it up close:

Our kids are being asked to grow on soil that is turning to dust beneath them.

I have seen classrooms without enough resources.

Teachers working second jobs to survive.

Parents frustrated, confused, and powerless.

Districts stretched so thin that one unexpected storm

can send an entire school system into crisis.

This is not the Texas I remember.

This is not the Texas we were promised.

And this is not the Texas our children deserve.

I can no longer pretend that Article 7 of the Texas Constitution —

which commands the Legislature to provide a system of “free and efficient public schools” —

is being honored.

Not when our local communities bear all the burden

and the State shrinks from its responsibility.

When we defund our schools,

we defund the very future that will one day replace us.

We weaken the minds that will one day lead us.

We silence the teachers who stood by us.

We betray the families who believe

that their children deserve more than a budget leftover.

I cannot watch that happen.

Not now.

Not ever again.

This fight is not about politics.

It is not about party lines.

It is about dignity.

It is about duty.

It is about the simple moral truth

that a society failing its children

is a society failing itself.

I stand today because schools are not buildings.

Schools are promises.

Promises we made to the next generation

that they will inherit a world worth living in.

If we break that promise,

we break the future.

And that is something I will never allow myself to stand by and watch again.

This is why I can no longer watch the defunding of our schools.

This is why I speak.

This is why I stand.