The meeting of the board of trustees of Richardson ISD on April 2, 2026, focused on the district's upcoming 2026-2027 budget, specifically the plan for almost $26 million in budget cuts. Watch the board meeting video for details. Here I want to highlight one trustee's passionate appeal to Austin for more public school funding. Eric Eager is running for re-election. With this speech from his chair on the dais, he made a powerful argument why he should be re-elected. He may be a David fighting against the Goliaths in Austin, but he left no doubt that he's not yielding. He's rallying support for public education.
Here is an excerpt of his speech.
Let's talk about this for a second, and the fact that this is not due to irresponsible tax-and-spend that you hear sometimes people say. Let me just walk you through simply the numbers here. I just want to give people who may not be up to speed on some of these things, why we're in the spot we're in. Fifty five dollars. That was the basic amount that was added to our student allotment. You know how many years we had to wait for fifty five dollars? Six years.
So we waited six years for our state to fund public education, and we got $55. Let's talk about that for a minute. Was this a situation where the state didn't have the money? ... Let's talk about what happened in those six years. 2021 — $11.2 billion surplus. 2023 — $32.7 billion. That is the biggest surplus in Texas history. 2025 — $24.5 billion. Over that six year period, $55 per student went to public education. 55 bucks.
Okay, so we finally got relief in the last legislative session. Let's talk about that for a minute. A billion dollars went to education savings accounts. The governor wanted; they delivered. ... As of right now, approximately 80% of the students that apply for that billion dollars are already in private schools.
They were dancing and were celebrating how much went into public education. It was seven or $8 billion. You know, this stuff is extremely complicated, Most of that funding, it simply reduced property taxes. ... I'm trying to make sure everyone understands, because this is complicated, but sometimes it's not. A big chunk of that money went to reduce property taxes. So it reduced our property taxes. Don't get me wrong. I pay, like everybody else. It didn't raise the amount of funding to public education. We didn't get more. When we hear about this kind of moving shells around, that's what it means.
We cannot go into the next legislative session and continue this defunding of education. It is irresponsible and negligent. ... We cannot continue to get capped, because here's the other thing, we [give] money back tn the state. We're Robin Hood. So imagine trying to operate where we get capped on the amount of funds that we have. We got no additional funds year in, year out, and we continue because we needed to pay and provide for our teachers, at least inflationary cost of living adjustments. It's simply the fact that we cannot continue to operate like this. Our state cannot allow this.
This board has been down there, I can't tell you how many times, and we talked until we're blue in the face with our representatives. And they basically do whatever they've been told. So, yeah, I sound frustrated, but everybody in this community should be.
So please do your homework. Please go and make sure that our voice is heard, because the only way is that the public finally says there are consequences to some of these decisions. There will and should be consequences, because we cannot continue to operate like this. ... I'm just getting tired of going down to Austin and saying there will be consequences. We need your help, and this next time, please go down there and say something. Please make sure that they take this seriously. Say this is important to us and it's important to our kids.
Source: RISD.
Legislators' behavior doesn't change without pressure at the ballot box. Eric Eager didn't name names, and out of respect for Eager, I won't either, at least not here. But speak to me privately, and I'll name three or four races on the November ballot that voters could use to make a difference in getting the state to live up to its constitutional obligation to support public education in Texas.
Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.
"Budget cuts loom large.
Austin's shadow stretches long.
Banner doesn't fall."
—h/t ChatGPT
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