Wharton ISD needs you more than ever

Off with his head! O’Guin’s gotta go! Our kids deserve better than this! Recall the school board!

I can just visualize the comments now as people read our front page story this week about how Wharton ISD and all four campuses are not rated this year, meaning they have failing grades in the annual school accountability report from the Texas Education Agency.

Parents and other stakeholders in the school district are right to be upset about the poor performance of the school district, but I think a lot of the anger is misdirected. Yes, as the top man in the district, Superintendent Michael O’Guin is ultimately accountable for the performance of the district. What most people don’t seem to realize is he didn’t create this mess, he inherited it. He has a five-year plan to turn things around and for the last two years he has been working the plan.

When O’Guin was hired, the district was coming off issues related to flooding from Hurricane Harvey. His first year was 2020 when the COVID pandemic hit. That has dogged this and every other district for the last two years. So why are our neighboring districts scoring A’s and B’s and Wharton is failing? Were they not suffering the same affects?

The short answer is the districts have different demographics of families served. Wharton is more impoverished than others in the region. Also, some of the families here whose students are higher achievers have fled to those neighboring districts, creating a brain-drain effect in Wharton.

The biggest problem that I see – and I’ve written about this before – are parents who don’t have their children ready to enter public education and who do not discipline their children at home. The school district is now having to spend time and resources (money and personnel) to correct behavior rather than advancing knowledge. Any time taken away from instruction is going to have consequences.

From what I’ve seen so far, O’Guin is doing everything humanly possible to turn the district around by bringing in new programs and personnel to improve teaching, leadership, and discipline. What he can’t do is teach parents how to do their job.

Before a child enters kindergarten, he or she should be able to sit still for a reasonable amount of time, listen attentively, count to 100, and recognize and recite every letter in the alphabet. They should also know how to respect and respond to adults and their peers. In my day we called those manners.

Parents really need to step up their game, take responsibility for rearing their children, and supporting the teachers and the schools. You can’t put parental responsibilities on the schools, but that’s what is happening. Teachers should be spending their time on readin’, writin’, and ’rithmatic, not playing baby sitter to the disruptive students who don’t know how to behave.

Most parents are doing a good job in this regard, but it only takes a few who either don’t care and/or don’t know how to handle their children to mess things up for everyone. If we can find a way to reach these parents and give them guidance, a lot of the problems the district is facing would go away or be significantly reduced.

I know there are some people out there who think I’m drunk on O’Guin’s Kool-Aid or on his payroll. Let me assure you that nothing is further from the truth. We’ve had our differences at times. My perspective on all of this comes from many years of covering school districts for newspapers and having studied and practiced proven leadership skills. I can look beyond the rumor mill and see what O’Guin is doing.

While he isn’t perfect – and who is – you’ve got to give him credit for making tough decisions and pushing his plan forward through a lot of noise and distraction. Wharton ISD didn’t fall into disarray over night and it won’t recover any faster. But it is improving. We must keep moving forward. We need to encourage and support the people we have in place because failing to do so is a step backwards. And those are steps we cannot afford to take.

Joe Southern is the managing editor of the Wharton Journal-Spectator and the East Bernard Express. He can be reached at news@journal-spectator.com.