Stephanie Elizalde: Austin showed resilience during tough time for schools

When I accepted the job as superintendent for Austin ISD in August 2020, I expected that this would be my last job before retirement. Unexpectedly, after two years here I find myself having to say goodbye. Before I leave at the end of the month, I wanted to check in with our community to take stock on what we’ve been able to accomplish together, under unprecedented and what I hope are unique circumstances. The truth of the matter is that I am proud of the Austin community. People often forget that educators have always been frontline workers. Not so during COVID as suddenly their essential functions were on display and appreciated as never before. We started to move from Zoom back into classrooms when I came on board, well before vaccines were approved. I’m proud of the job we did back then to keep our classrooms safe. In fact, the COVID rates inside our classrooms were lower than in the community at large.

Then, when masks became politicized, the Austin ISD community stepped up again. You sent your kiddos back to school during the Delta wave with masks on, and they kept them on through the Omicron wave. All this year, volunteers stepped up to organize vaccination clinics and testing pop ups. They vaccinated thousands of children and this spring became the largest COVID testing provider in town. This was heroic work that you, the community, did. All through this time, it seemed like school board meetings in other districts and states had become the front lines in a new culture war. Not in Austin. We might have had a couple people complain about masks, but nothing like we saw on the national news. Elsewhere, books got pulled from shelves. In Austin, not a single one. For the last year, Austin revealed itself as a national beacon of calm and reason. This isn’t to say that we didn’t have our share of controversies, but when we had to stick up for our kids, the community had our backs. The Attorney General tried to recategorize supporting trans kids as child abuse, and our community was having none of that. Then some said we were breaking the law by celebrating Pride, and Austin again had our backs.