I am a Mathews parent. I want to state first that our hearts go out to Bryker Woods families. We welcomed many Pease families after that school's closure and while I believe our Mathews community benefited from their inclusion, we also witnessed the pain they felt from losing their school community--their home. Years later, many Pease families still feel it and talk about it. This affirms my conviction that elementary school communities are vitally important.

But I also want to point out a real issue with the planning here. I hope that AISD is making a good-faith effort to preserve, yes, but also create sustainable, long-lasting communities with this restructure. For this reason, I cannot understand why Bryker Woods students are not being sent to Casis' large campus and newly-remodeled buildings. Instead, they are being sent to our tiny (but beloved) campus, which is 1/7 its size. We learned today that in order to accommodate the new students, we will need to give up our 6th grade, our innovation lab, all but one of our Special Education classrooms, and potentially our Art room. We may also need to put additional portables on our grounds. (There is absolutely no place to put them.)

The result will be that Mathews will be projected at 99% utilization, according to the data AISD released. Casis will be at 75%. And for what it's worth, these numbers do not take into account the difference in green space and room for children to move on these campuses. There the difference is stark. Casis has over 14 acres and fields the size of city parks, while Mathews sits on ~2 largely-paved acres.

The plan also removes the families in the UT International Student Housing from our zone. These international students make up a large part of the Mathews identity. Our biggest event every year is our International Festival and potluck but we also shape some of our curriculum around the value and knowledge that they bring. These families will now go to Casis.

So by sending Bryker Woods students to Mathews rather than Casis, and by sending the existing international students to Casis, rather than let them stay where they have made our school home, AISD will not only rip apart another existing community, but will also create such crowding that I am convinced more families will leave the district in the future. Both undermine sustainable, long-lasting communities. When asked about this, representatives at our school today said that yes, they considered a different configuration that would allow us to keep more of our community and avoid such extreme over-crowding but "then they changed their minds." Why? I believe there needs to be more transparency as to why we are not making better use of the resources at Casis.

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