Governor, SUSPEND STAAR and stop holding CARES Act funds hostage.

Will you send a letter to the governor demanding he suspend STAAR and release the $1.2 billion CARES Act funds to local school districts instead of holding the money hostage at the expense of students, teachers and staff? Every other state, to our knowledge, has already released its allocated CARES funds to local school districts.

Standardized testing is not mandatory for learning to occur. In fact, high stakes testing perpetuates institutionalized racism and causes students real harm. In the middle of this pandemic when Latino and African-Americans are three times as likely to become infected as their white neighbors, it is time for us to eliminate this racist relic from our schools.

The governor should seek a waiver from the US Department of Education from mandatory federal testing requirements for the 2020-2021 school year and remove STAAR graduation requirements and STAAR-based school accountability during the upcoming 2021 legislative session. Georgia already has sought a waiver and Texas should follow suit.

It is tone deaf and irresponsible to spend $90 million this year to administer the Texas STAAR test in the middle of a pandemic. Texas is in the middle of an alarming spike in Coronavirus cases; Houston has a 25% COVID-19 test positivity rate and Texas has the highest number of uninsured individuals in the country. To continue with high stakes testing is a slap in the faces of every homeless student, every family crowded ten to a room, and every poor and vulnerable person who was struggling before this pandemic and is struggling even more now.

Our children need a massive investment in public schools, not a tunnel vision focus on high stakes standardized testing. STAAR will punish schools and communities at a time when the focus should be on safety, racial equity, and on academic, social and emotional well-being of our students and families. This pandemic further exacerbates what we already know—that high stakes testing is a measure of poverty, not of learning.

The governor must also release the $1.2 billion CARES Act Elementary and Secondary Schools Emergency Relief Funds earmarked to local school districts for unexpected costs due to COVID. He is instead using these funds to balance the state budget and is allocating a mere fraction to school districts for hand sanitizer, masks, and gloves.

The state’s refusal to release these funds is sabotaging reopening plans (whether virtual, face to face or hybrid) at the local level. It is putting the most vulnerable students, for whom school is a safe haven, at increased risk.

Send a letter to the governor today using this sample letter. If you can, please edit the letter or add a few sentences at the beginning to make it more personal.