Texas AFT launches Open Letter to Our Elected Officials campaign

3 days ago
6 min read

This week, we at Texas AFT launched our Open Letter to Our Elected Officials campaign, which will serve as our focus for the 2026 back to school season, November elections, and the 90th legislative session to come in 2027. The letter is anchored with three central planks:

FundED – Fund our public schools
ProtectED – Protect our students and staff
RespectED – Respect our educators

Each plank has detailed areas where lawmakers have enacted policy failures, or in many cases, no policy at all. The Open Letter covers a range of issues including school funding, wages, paperwork, freedom to teach, gun safety, behavioral support, mental health counseling, and more. For those looking for a detailed account of where things stand in Texas public education across all these issue areas, the Open Letter is a good place to start.

We will be working over the next 6 months to collect letter signatures to prove to lawmakers that Texans of all stripes and in all corners of the state are tired of the status quo and will hold elected officials accountable not just for policy failures but to work to enact reasonable and comprehensive fixes. It’s not like Texas AFT has no policy prescriptions that legislators can start from; they need only to ask.

We encourage you to add your name today and join the educators and supporters across the state that aren’t ready to give up on our kids: they’re worth too much to do that.

Full letter text:

An Open Letter from Texas Educators to Our Elected Officials

From pre-K classrooms to community college and university campuses

As Texas educators — in our public-school classrooms, community colleges, and universities — we bear witness every day to our students’ successes, and to the gaps in support that we are left to fill. We are the ones who pull from our own pockets to supply our classrooms, to provide backpacks for the kids on our bus routes, and to cover lab fees, textbooks, and emergency aid so our college students can stay enrolled — bridging the gaps that our policymakers continue to miss.

On annual “Appreciation Days,” we watch policymakers give accolades about our commitment to our students, whether we teach kindergarten or freshman chemistry. They’re right: we are committed to our students. Every day we work with our colleagues, parents, and communities — and, on our campuses, with our fellow faculty and staff — to make the best of the situation. We partner with school board members, boards of trustees, and elected officials who believe in public education at every level. Still, we struggle with one bitter reality: our schools and campuses are not FundED, our students and staff are not ProtectED, and our educators are not RespectED.

FundED: Fund Our Public Schools

The facts cannot be argued:

Every year across our state, educators spend approximately $286,400,000 of our own money on supplies for our schools, while we make less.
When adjusted for inflation, wages are down, and hourly employees like paras, bus drivers, and food service workers are making below poverty wages.
While state leaders point to recent funding increases, the governor’s voucher law set aside $1 billion for education savings accounts in 2026-27. Early application data showed that only 36,000 of more than 150,000 applicants reported attending public school in 2024-25, and nearly 76% of school-aged applicants were already in private or home schools.
Meanwhile, Texas awarded $388 million in four-year contracts to develop and administer STAAR beginning in 2021. Those vendors still operate key parts of a testing system whose results drive high-stakes accountability and state intervention.
Special education now serves 16.6% of Texas public school students, yet districts still face an estimated $1.69 billion gap between what required services cost and what state and federal funding cover.

Add this up along with a litany of unfunded mandates – like security requirements, reading academies, and the implementation of the cellphone ban – and you have a bill that’s come due.

Higher education has fared no better:

State support for our community colleges — the engine of Texas’s workforce — has collapsed from covering 68% of costs in 1980 to just 26% today, shifting the burden onto students and families through rising tuition and fees.
Meanwhile, our public universities face escalating political pressure that diverts time, money, and attention away from teaching and research: defending academic freedom against attacks on tenure, and rebuilding diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts that helped recruit top faculty and support first-generation students.
Texas AFT’s Lost Decade (and a Half) report shows that, adjusted for inflation, average teacher pay has fallen more than 9% since 2010 — and the same funding neglect that produced that decline in our K-12 schools is now being visited on our public colleges and universities.

The Texas Constitution prioritized our public schools. Too many of today’s policies undermine that priority, sending public dollars to private and out-of-state interests instead of our classrooms and campuses.

ProtectED: Protect Our Students and Staff

Protecting students and staff takes all of us, and many lawmakers, educators, and advocates across the political spectrum have worked in good faith to make our schools safer. But good intentions haven't closed the gap — and the decision to underfund public schools carries real consequences, some of them measured in physical harm and even lives lost:

Our state saw 11 school shootings in 2023 and 2024, and hardly any effective measures were taken in the following legislative session to prevent future lives lost.
In 2024, an aide in Northside ISD died after being pushed to the ground by a student.
At least 17 children were hit by cars last year in Cy-Fair ISD after bus routes were cut to balance the budget.
In Corsicana ISD, an assistant principal lost an eye after breaking up a student altercation.

All these tragedies could have been avoided if our schools were funded and staffed to the correct levels, with enough money for essentials like bus routes, special ed funding and mental health counseling.

That underfunding and lack of protection reach our campuses too. State takeovers of higher education institutions — governing boards and administrators pushed aside in favor of political appointees with little connection to the campus — threaten the same kind of harm we’ve seen play out in our public schools: decisions made far from the classroom, without input from the faculty, staff, and students who know it best. Just as our schools cannot be protected by unfunded mandates alone, our colleges and universities cannot serve students well under governance that answers to politics rather than to educators and the communities they serve.

RespectED: Respect Our Educators

Every year, we hear about the need for accountability in our schools, but that seems to apply only to the employees. We are held accountable for the work of officials who decide the curriculum, the tests, and the funding. They are the same officials whose decisions have resulted in abysmal rankings on child well-being indicators.

The accountability runs only one way in pre-K-12 : support staff — paraprofessionals, bus drivers, food service employees, and custodial staff — lack due process rights when disciplined or terminated. They can be pushed out without notice, cause, or a hearing, leaving employees who already live paycheck to paycheck exposed to retaliation and job insecurity, while the officials whose decisions harm our students face no consequences at all.

That same one-way accountability follows our colleagues onto college and university campuses. Faculty and staff there face escalating attacks on tenure and academic freedom, eroding the due process and job security that let them teach, research, and speak honestly without fear of political retaliation.

It is time for those responsible for these policies to listen to the school and campus employees, students, and families who show up to board meetings, regents’ meetings, and legislative hearings with real solutions. It is time to start funding public school classrooms and public college campuses, not charter and private schools. It is time to fund our kids’ bus routes and our students’ financial aid, not private planes for charter executives or political appointees with no stake in our campuses. It is time that elected leaders are held to the same expectations that we set for our students: to collaborate, cooperate, and engage in active listening.

Let’s turn intentions into outcomes. Whether you’re an elected official that stands with us, or one that continues to push an agenda that takes from our classrooms and campuses, we will continue to pay attention and hold you accountable.

The work ahead isn’t easy — educators, students, and families, from pre-K through post-doc, know that better than anyone. But real change happens when people with a shared commitment roll up their sleeves and work together to fix what’s broken, and we’re ready to do that. We will not give up. Our kids are worth too much.