I am a 2016 graduate and I just moved into my dorm on the University of Texas at Austin a week ago and so far it’s been a great experience.

Now, the University of Texas at Austin is a notoriously hard school to get accepted into. If you’re not in the top eight percent of your graduating class or on a football scholarship? Forget it.

And yet, everywhere I go, I see people from Frisco. Wakeland, Independence, Liberty, Heritage, all schools just minutes from my house. I’ve met people here who I never even knew in Frisco.

I was not in the top ten percent at Liberty, much less the top eight percent. But I’m here, buying textbooks, wearing burnt orange, and prepping for my second week of classes.

That’s all because of Frisco ISD. There’s a reason so many students I meet are from Frisco. It’s because of the opportunities that were afforded to us, the teachers that pushed us past what we were required to know in high school, and the reputation that Frisco has crafted over time.

Now, I’m a double journalism-government major and over the summer I stayed out of the TRE talk because I was working for the Dallas Morning News as a reporter. I wasn’t covering Frisco or the TRE, but still I thought on a professional level that it was important to not get sucked into some of the rhetoric that I saw about the election. I wanted to maintain the objectivity that I believe is so important to journalism.
(Which by the way, I NEVER would have gotten that internship at The Dallas Morning News if it wasn’t for the education offered to me in Frisco ISD. My journalism teachers, Mr. Brian Higgins and Ms. Carole Babineaux, were not only influential as teachers, but as friends as well. Between the two of them, they made it possible for me to excel in a field that I never thought of as a career.)

But now, I can’t believe I didn’t say something. In the aftermath of the TRE failing, I saw someone say, maybe we shouldn’t have called it “Yes to Frisco Teachers” because it made the vote seem like it was only about the teachers.

Do you know how sad that is? The very thought that our town couldn’t buck up the support behind the very people who make our Frisco students feel loved, important, and intelligent? We can’t support those people? Then who can we support?

I’m 18. I’m no saint. I’ve complained about homework. I’ve complained about teachers that gave me a bad grade. I’ve complained about Frisco and how boring it can get sometimes.

But I’ve always known that I am privileged to attend schools that thought of me individually, not as a small part of a very large crowd. Frisco ISD has over 56,000 students. It could be easy to get lost in the shuffle, but our small schools concept meant I could be NHS president and work as editor of Liberty Wingspan, our student-produced news publication. I could be in Student Council AND be on the UIL team. I could play basketball while taking AP classes.

I could have teachers that knew me not only by name, but knew my family and noticed when I was stressed. I survived on very little sleep in high school and I cannot tell you how many times one of my teachers pulled me aside after class to make sure I was doing okay.

I have friends at Allen and Plano West. I know what those students go through. If I was just one more graduate in a class of over 2,000, would I have burned out? Would anyone have noticed? Those are the kinds of questions that haunt me when we get to talking about taxes and the small schools concepts.

It’s easy to think in abstraction, about taxes and big government and fiscal responsibility or whatever the argument was about. Saying yes to Frisco teachers wasn’t just about salary, it was about putting your support behind teachers who are with your kids sometimes more hours in the day than parents are.

And so, I just wanted to say I’m sorry to those teachers that truly did shape how I think about the world. Y’all always went above and beyond for us. You made sure we were not only ready for college, but ready to excel in college. Failing wasn’t an option, mediocrity wasn’t an option, success was the goal and I cannot tell you how valuable that concept is to me.

When I made my speech at graduation in June, I was able to look out on that crowd and know that I had a relationship with my principals, I was close with my teachers, and those graduates were my friends. I really, truly hope that future graduating classes can say the same.

Thanks,
Sarah Philips