At last night's meeting, Michael Sullivan (of Empower Texans) offered sage counsel on the most effective way to have your voice heard by your State legislator. What is there there to be vocal about? Do you want the full list, or just the top ten? Let's start with using Texas' nearly $9 billion dollar Rainy Day fund to cover the budget shortfall. This is particularly daunting to our schools as they are a huge chunk of our overall budget. The premise seems to be that we must either spend RD$$ on our schools or we will see drastic cuts in the classroom. Legislators need to know that we are not convinced. A study from Texans Conservative Coalition Research Institute shows there are just as many non-teachers on the payroll as are there are teachers. Why not not spend our Rainy Day fund, not cut teachers, and jettison unnecessary, redundant administrators (most of whom make far more than teachers). Eliminate archaic departments and superfluous spending. Do those things first. Why won't that work? It seems we are being given a false choice. Now, what to do about it:
Per Mr. Sullivan, the most effective thing you can do (short of storming Austin) is to write letters to your legislators. The easiest way to do that is with the Empower Texans free letter template and delivery service. Yes, you read that right. They will hand carry your letter to the office of your legislator. You can't beat that for service. The next best alternative is to send an email. And, last but not least, put in a phone call to register your remarks.
If we all interact with our legislator on a weekly basis, our sacrifice of 10 minutes will have an undeniable, inescapable impact on Texas government. So, write, email, or call...but commit to doing something.
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