The Dumb Zone FREE - Dumb Zone+: Jake sits down with Harper Weaver

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

Get every episode of The Dumb Zone by subscribing to the show at DumbZone.com or Patreon.com/TheDumbZoneJake is joined by Harper Weaver, World Series Champion and candidate for Plano School Board. Harper is running Plano ISD School Board Place 3. The General Election is May 3, 2025. Early voting starts April 22. If you live in Plano or have friends that do, give him a chance to earn your business. ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

You are listening to subscriber only content. I'm doing a little bit of Business Wednesday, as Dan will often do, and talk to local movers and shakers in the community. Well, I'm going to do that this week. There'll be someone who's attempting to move and potentially shake. It is my good friend, Harper Weaver. Hi Jake, thanks for having me. I just found out your first name is John. Yeah, yeah. From your election disclosure or candidate filing paperwork as... Yes, and the first name is John. Yeah, yeah your election disclosure or candidate filing paperwork Yes, and the preferred name is Harper Harper is running for school board in Plano

That is correct. That is correct never held public office never sought public office So I imagine this is something that will be It would be wise of you to use as a campaign material here. So would you like to just introduce yourself, give the background a little bit as much as you'd like? I don't know how much your personality is part of your platform, but the floor is yours. Yeah, sure.

Like you said, I've never run for public office before. A year ago, I would not have seen this in the cards at all. Would you go to city council meetings or anything, or stuff like any level of, I mean, I know you're a guy who will vote on you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ballot box, hate to see a Harper coming, but. Yeah, not like real active.

Yeah, yeah, not getting in there and really getting in the muck of things. And that's why I wouldn't have said this was coming. But I've got two kids currently in Plano ISD, a second grader and a kindergartner. And then I've got a kid that's not old enough yet, so she'll join them shortly. And they're thriving, they're doing great. So that's one of those things when your kids are coming home with great test scores, and they're reading above grade level, and everything's going great.

You don't necessarily feel the need to go to school board meetings and see how the machine is working. You're just happy with results. And that changed in May last year when they announced the school closings, and I started to look into the process and said, I can do better than this. This is not being done correctly. Plano has 47,000 kids. So if you think you have the chance to improve the lives of 47,000 students, and you have the means to do so, you

kind of think you have the moral imperative to try. And what is your professional background? How are you describing that? Yeah I'm a data engineer. I've been a data engineer for 15 years. I've worked for a lot of different sectors which I think works to my benefit. Like I've worked for a startup that helps fashion bloggers monetize their content. I've worked for a defense contractor. I worked for a major league baseball team, the Royals,

won a World Series. World Series. He's got a ring. Yep, it's a big ring. Worked for healthcare startups. I worked for a life insurance startup. So all those things are different sets of data that you have to look at differently.

And so I've seen, I've got a breadth in the experience of wrangling things and doing my own independent analysis on things. And that's important for a school board position because you have a lot of different areas that you need to be able to analyze, right? It's not just school data. You have teacher performance data.

You have data on facilities. Traffic is more of a city council thing. Okay, yeah. Okay, I just know that you mentioned like walk times in here. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Transportation. Yeah, like bus routes and managing the budget and all kinds of things. It's not just, you know, like you open up one spreadsheet and that's kinds of things. It's not just you open up one spreadsheet and that's the school data. It's a very diverse role data-wise. Yeah, and I know that when we get emails from the school with recapture, there's always a talk of this money is this,

this money is this, this money is that. So it's not even just that there's a bunch of different industries basically being interfaced with within the school board. It's also that the money is not just like in out. It's that you have money that's for certain, the recapture thing is the one that jumps out, but I'm sure there are other things too.

Yeah, and you have different sources of money, right? Like you have the taxes that come in and the general allotment from the state. They give money per head for students. But then you also have bond packages. And there's a lot of different- You're passing at the city level? Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. Technically at the district level. Like Plano ISD has, I think there's seven different cities in it. It's centered around Plano, but you know, Eclipse, Dallas, and Richardson, and Murphy. So if you live on the far west side of Murphy, you're still in Plano ISD. Well I think it's really, really interesting because I think this is why, partially why

the other part is ego, but I think sometimes journalists, if they're smart about it, can be good politicians because they just interact with such a wide, wide range of people and they learn how different businesses work. And yeah, that's, it's really, I think, I've always thought like you have a skill of just kind of Treating everything the same like I don't know how to describe that but it's like the context of the situation Not to say you don't care emotionally about these kids, but it's almost like the context doesn't matter. It's just I Have these numbers and I can produce a better solution with them for the same cost So I think that's that's awesome I have these numbers and I can produce a better solution with them for the same cost.

So I think that's awesome, but it also helps that you really care about it. Yeah, you have to be level-headed here. More than the Instagram bloggers or whatever. Yeah. But the process is kind of the same. Yeah, eventually you get all the data and the way that it needs to be you know kind of aggregated to analyze it and then from that point you just got to leave out the emotion and get in there and that's see that's what I

provide is this is what we're describing is this type of independent analysis I can do because right now I, every council member for every school board will tell you that everything they're doing is data driven. But a lot of that comes from being handed a packet, saying, here's what the conclusion is. Look at these fancy charts. And they support that conclusion. Wow, this packet's huge.

It must have really grinded the numbers. And I don't think that's acceptable. Who is producing that packet? The district themselves. So the way a school board works is the public elects the school board members. In Plano, it's seven at-large seats. So there's no districting.

District, yeah. Four-year terms, staggered. So every two years, there's votes. Right now, there's four seats up. Two years from now, there'll be three seats up rinse and repeat it's the charge of those people to hire the superintendent of the district and that's the sole employee of the board like a city manager yeah yeah sort of like that and then they do everything else they hire deputy superintendents they hire

they make all the decisions on who's going to you know it's a massive operation they're given a budget for the general operation yeah the Plano budget before recapture is 700 million dollars approximately I mean I don't know what is it isn't a lot but that's that's a lot yeah it's like running a pretty decent size business. Yeah, or small city, really. Yeah, kinda, yeah. Yeah, for example, the city of Plano is going to have 600 and, like 630 something million dollars worth of bond proposals this upcoming May.

And that's the biggest the city of Plano's ever had. And that's the biggest the city of Plano has ever had. The Plano ISD just passed about 1.2 billion in 2022. Wow. It's, there's a lot going on here, right? So the school board hires the superintendent and then they oversee the entire operation. But then the other role that they're supposed to, the school board is supposed to have, is providing oversight

over that operation. So they have to come back with the big decisions and run it by the elected officials and that makes, that lets the elected officials, the only seven elected people, because you can't be electing every single person this operation, that would be chaos, right? Right. Let them provide oversight over that to be the public mouthpiece. I smell a problem. Right. And so that's where you need to have independent analysis come in. Otherwise, things can get by you or things can slip through the cracks. And what we have, the problem right now that I've observed, like I talked earlier,

and I'm sure we'll talk about this more, the school closing stuff was my catalyst for getting into here, but I've watched hundreds of hours of school board meetings and not just from Plano, from surrounding areas as well, to see what's different between Richardson and Plano, Garland and Plano. And Plano has a problem with complacency.

The school board and the district are on the same team, buddy-buddy, and that's a problem. That's the exact opposite of what the role is supposed to be. Not that the role is supposed to be like a... Adversarial. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. They're not supposed to be starting fires and working against the district, but they're supposed to be asking critical questions at these public meetings, which happens from time to time, but it's rare and it's not often enough, and it's not from enough of the school board members. And occasionally voting no on something.

Wouldn't that be nice? Did you say there were some shocking numbers? Yes, it's seven out of seven. Shocking to me. We saw a unicorn this Tuesday, a 6-1 vote. Which you only see about 3% of the time. Wow. And it's just, imagine getting seven people,

independent people, on the same page for 97% of what you do. They're not really independent people at that point. Common sense would indicate that they're not operating independently, no. No, that's why I don't really have an opinion on this because it's been a long time since I thought about it, but obviously this is part of the risk of at-large seats. But certainly there are problems with doing it the other way. Sometimes, people end up in jail, like J-Dub B,

for being your man downtown. That happens way more in those type of situations where you have patron politics. But in any case, so. And there's also halfway measures. So the Texas Association of School Boards has recommendations for how to run these things and so what you can do is you have seven seats. You can also do a combination. I have heard of that actually. You're

gonna have four at-large seats and then one and the Plano has three senior high schools so they have three feeder patterns east, west, central. So you could have one at-large seat in each of those or no not one at-large seat, one district seat. Yeah that makes sense. Or two district seats in each of those. Or not one at large seat, one district seat. District, yeah, that makes sense. Or two district seats in each of those and one at large seat. You can mix and match. So you may not have this information,

but this would not indicate that this is not also a problem. But is that level of coalescence agreement of then the 90% is that common with other school boards? It's not as bad with other school boards, but it is pretty common. Yeah, I would think. It's a good old boys club. They like to, well, and presenting a united front. That makes sense also. But it makes more sense that the reason that you're arriving at the same conclusion

is because you're being provided data from the same people that you're paying to tell you. Everyone's getting the same packet. Right. Yeah. So at that point, that would actually seem to be like that would create more uniform response than anything else.

So how do you change that? You run for school board. You get in there and you start. I mean, honestly, when you told me that number, that was one of the first things. I'm not going to tell you how to do your job. But I feel like the average person, regardless of their politics, I really think

the average person in Texas, I don't know if conservative, left leaning, whatever, would say that's just not a tenable representation of democracy. Yeah. If you can just tell them that. It looks more like theater. Yeah, and most people who weren't told that would say that doesn't make any sense. So I feel like that's a good entree right there. Yeah, no, it's definitely something that I've been using at these forums and stuff that I've had to go to. So it's extremely not my thing.

Yeah, well, I want to talk about that. So the packet arrives. We've got this track record of just agreeing. And the packet I gather indicated we recommend closing these three elementary schools. Two elementary schools and two middle schools. OK. And it's a tough situation.

And it's something, this is very annoying because it's something that a lot of people will fall back on and use as a crutch, is they'll say, this is hard work. It's necessary, it's hard work, we have to do it, no one wants to do it. And then that dismisses all the analysis that should be done in the middle. It dismisses the steps where it should be done right. So for example, the two middle schools in there, I think it makes sense to close them. And it's not because your kids don't go there? No, one of them is on the same street as my elementary school.

My kids don't go there right now, but it's still closing that down. And I'm still like, I'm taking a property hit on that. And so I can tell you, that's not why I'm campaigning because I'm not like I'm taking a property hit you know on that and you know so I can tell you that's not why I'm campaigning because I'm not going after both of them they're on the same street they're point two miles away from each other and there but it makes sense from the amount of enrollment that they have from their locations they're both centrally located so it's easy to move the populations out in a way, to redistrict

in a way that sets it up pretty easily. If you've got a triangle and then one in the middle, if you try and remove any of the points on the side, you're going to have a real weird boundary problem with lots of transportation issues. It saves much more money than it does closing an elementary school to close a middle school. Middle schools have bigger problems, they have more programs in them. And so when you have low enrollment at a middle school, you start to have bigger problems. Like Armstrong Middle School hasn't finished a football season in three seasons.

You start off with enough kids to play football. There's UIL rules that say you have to have at least, I don't know what the number is, but you can't be playing 11 kids on offense and defense. Right. It's a safety issue. So when the, as students either get injured or lose interest or have academic problems and have to drop out or move away, whatever, you got the attrition on that team. And so for the last three seasons they had to cancel the program. Yeah, so the dollar doesn't go as far per kid when you have to.

You've already spent the money, right? You've already allotted for these programs. And if they go underused, there's nothing really. It's not like you get money back for, you know what I mean? This one's not entirely a financial thing for this part. This is a chance to give kids programs. You need enough kids in the programs in order to have the programs. That makes sense too.

Yeah, so the way I experienced it, I found the sweet spot, right, was they opened a third high school, which was, which meant that I was able to play, right? So like, where we are in South Lake, one high school, right? I live just as close to here as I do to where I went to high school. But then the flip side of that is we don't even have enough to get out here. I didn't think of that too. So yeah, that makes it. And elementary schools kind of daycare. The elementary schools, they save much less money by closing them.

And they don't have a lot of those programs. They still have programs. In fact the the two elementary schools that are closed have very specialized programs. The one in the central Davis has the regional day school program for the deaf. Wow that yeah. They bus in students from all around like from other cities not just all of Plano. They bus in kids from Richardson, McKinney, Frisco, all that, so that they can use the economies of scale and have them all in the same place so they can have proper equipment, instruction, things like that for them. And so they're moving

that to Harrington, which is one mile to the east, and I've got a couple different problems with that. One is you just go talk to the community and tell, and they'll tell you immediately that the problem they have with it is like the kids that are in Davis right now, the school that's closing, that aren't deaf, are used to being around all these other kids. They can sign with them, they can communicate with them in a way that when you move to another population,

those kids are gonna feel much more isolated than they are in their current environment. It's like one of the parents that went up there and stood in front of the school board at the meeting told them, you know, it's a community that's going to take decades to rebuild because it's not just a switch you throw on. You can't just throw some money at it and teach kids how to sign and teach them how to communicate. Yeah, that's very interesting. I mean, I would imagine some of it would be offset by the whole student population moving.

So some of those kids. So is the idea for all of that? Yeah, half the kids will be. And also, though, would they all be just going to one other elementary? So they'll move the day school program over there. But what about, so I guess what I'm saying is, is there currently an elementary with the capacity to simply assume a full other another elementary?

No, they're splitting, so this elementary, I sent you a big old PDF. So if you scroll down a couple pages you'll see these maps, yeah. So there's one, the Davis one is the first one. So you can see here, this shows the districts, how they are now is the red lines, and then the colored sections are where they're going. These teal arrows, I added them to make the map much more digestible, but you can see this arrow here

is where they are, so they're moving some of the population to the west and some of it to the east. So actually, the point I'm trying to make is I feel like if you do it that way, it dilutes the familiarity for those kids even more. Because if you just moved all of the school to another one, there would at least be some love. You'd at least have the friends that were there.

But if you're cutting that number in half. Then it's a real problem. Or it seems like a real problem. And that's, I guess, one of those type of things where the average person just doesn't know that. So that's the job of the public, but also then the representation, potentially you, to make sure people know that.

So is this a done deal? You're talking like this is done. Yeah this is... It's closing. Essentially done. Okay. You know, I'm still a fat lady sings advocate so until they bulldoze the schools which they have announced the intention to bulldoze all four. And so your hope is to explain that this is, you know, if you were to be elected, general election is what, May? May 2nd? May 3rd. Yeah, early voting on April 22nd. Elections on May 3rd. So if you were elected, your hope would be simply, not simply, but to prevent this

from happening further. Yes, using my skill set to make sure that, and that that one's not the the one I have the biggest problem with. The two elementary to junior high situation? Well, no, the second elementary school is the one that I have the problem with. Now, full disclosure, it is my kids, but I think that is just a, it's a coincidence that I have that skill set. I have the ability, the financial means to be able to put work aside for a bit and get into a race for a totally unpaid position

where you have to finance a campaign. You know, I just don't think they saw that coming from this. So let's take a look at the other, you can see the other maps here, and this is what I talked about earlier, the middle schools just kind of, whoop, everything goes out. And then if you look at the fourth map, that would be Foreman,

and it looks like it's drawn by Napoleon. OK. There's 12 different areas where people are moving. Our students are being rezoned from one school to another. Foreman goes out into five, but then they're rezoning the entire district. That's crazy. And it's because the three schools that

have the the biggest problem with capacity, unused capacity, are all the ones that are in the Far East here. So there's three schools that are in Murphy. So you're just removing the center of the district and dispersing it out. And then just trying to flush a lot of it to the east to get rid of the where the actual capacity issue is okay so jeez that introduces all kinds of problems and some of them some of them I don't even know where to start but it will start here this is the one that that gets me the most is that school is also okay so you can look at this map you can

see this key over here it tells you these little these little markers are where the apartments and high capacity housing is and so you can see Foreman is surrounded not surrounded but it's got four high capacity things very close to it and you can see these numbers here how many students there are there so Foreman has hundreds of kids that walk to school. Yeah, so these are okay. Yeah. Foreman's over 80% economically disadvantaged. Foreman's over two-thirds Spanish-speaking, bilingual. Like I said earlier, both the elementary schools have specialized programs. Foreman has a dual language program. And so you can see all the other Forman's right in

the central of the east cluster and it's the farthest south and farthest east of any dual language program. There's other dual language programs over here but this entire section buses to Forman right now. And so they're taking that away and they're gonna bus to here and here instead. So all the students that are busing. It's like double. Yeah. And there's more problems with transportation too, right?

So the kids walk in there right now. Because Foreman has such a high economically disadvantaged population, they're the only school in Plano that qualifies for universal free breakfast. Okay. Other schools have programs where you can have, you know, vouchers for reduced or free breakfast. They're not the only school with breakfast. A lot of people jump on my case when I start presenting that. They're not the only school with breakfast. The only ones where like

the cash registers aren't on. You walk in and grab pancakes. And that's important for a population like that because bilingual populations are sometimes harder to reach out to. They don't respond to emails as much. It's harder to inform them that, hey, you need to fill out this piece of paper if you want your kid to be able to have free breakfast. And so, in Foreman, they don't have to do that.

They walk in, they get breakfast. And for some of those kids, it's gonna be their best meal of the day. Now they'll be on a bus. So right now, doors open at seven o'clock, school starts at 740, and if you show up at seven o'clock you'll see kids already walking across that field to go to school. Those kids will now be waiting at a bus stop before seven o'clock and showing up to the school just as, you know, the bell's about to ring and won't even have time for that meal, even if they qualify for free or reduced. This is one of the things that just didn't get evaluated. And this is stuff, this is where it's not just data.

That's the thing, right? Here, we're talking some numbers here and there, but it's also just scrutiny. It's the, the, like the inner desire to just never say, okay, shrug, okay, whatever. It's just being critical. Yeah, I mean, it's really- Not being complacent.

Again, to go back to the thing that you would just say to somebody that maybe you wouldn't have to explain because they deal with it, it's just like, there's just no way you think that an idea that was not challenged at all is the best one. No one is, what sort of pushback is there? Who's presenting the alternative option?

Because in a weird way, they probably are just looking at data. Like they're not thinking about the qualitative part of it, the impacts of it, the boots on the ground part of it at all. So that part's screwed. And we can go through some of that process. But data, I don't know. I mean, they obviously are coming up with something saying,

this is the only way to do this, right? And that's the big problem is they do publish their process. They have a committee they put together called the Long Range Facility Planning Committee. And they like these things called they call guiding principles where they so the community is going to be made up of not people from the district but will be advised to send a group by the district. It's made up of parents of teachers of you know business leaders people from the east west central. second committee committee seventy two person committee

uh... which by find to be a little bit absurd too many people as much as my best in less they're able to maintain a ninety seven percent uh... because that that's just straight up pyeongyang impressive so and then they walk through this this framework of hey here's how we're Because then that's just straight up Pyongyang impressive. And then they walk through this framework of, hey, here's how we're making these decisions.

Here's what we're going to consider. And then they'll tell you like they're considering things like transportation. Time spent on buses, the metric they throw out there. And then it just didn't happen. They didn't do it. It's not present. It just says we're going to? The framework they laid out does not come to this conclusion

that they came to, and I can tell you why too. It's because before they had this committee, they had another committee, the Future Forward Task Force, which they. Oh, I like that one. That's a little better name, because that's here in long range. Yeah, yeah.

I'm not commenting on the performance. Neither acronym. I think we need on the performance. Neither acronym. I think we need some acronym work here, because it doesn't really roll off the tongue. The tongue's actually not involved at all. But they were the committee that put together the bond package for the last bond in 2022. And so that's the other link I sent you,

the PDF that you said, I don't understand what's going on here. And I can walk you through it a bit. So the process there is they, again, same thing. It just looked like, to me, like an agenda of, we're going to decide how important are the, we're going to rank a level of importance to these things. Exactly. One of them being, or a couple of them being schools.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So they had seven different subcommittees for things like transportation. It would have its own group of people who were going to look into the transportation thing. So you didn't have to have every single member of the committee looking into everything. One of them was facilities.

That was the biggest one. They had the most items. So those are the ones that were going through and they have all these items that have been identified already by the district as candidates for things to be included in the bond. And sometimes they're as simple as like the HVAC system at this elementary school needs major innovation or the cafeteria at this one. Cafeteria was a big one in the 2022 bond, there was a lot of cafeterias got replaced. So they go through all these different elements and they apply a label to them. There's critical, high, desired, and not accepted are the

four that we're getting applied to things. And so you had a couple of the schools, you had four schools up for consideration to be rebuilt completely. And so what the committee came out and did is they said Armstrong, which is the middle school that closed in the east, they said, not considered, not accepted. They're not going to rebuild it. The next step after this is for all of these items from all the subcommittees to go to the committee at large to rank which things are actually

getting included in the package. And they said, we're using our expertise in the subcommittee to just remove this from consideration from the committee at large. So Armstrong closing, not rebuilt. Closing, not rebuilt. Now here, they're not closing it. They are sort of signing the death warrant for it.

Because ultimately, those three schools, Armstrong, Carpenter, and Foreman, the one thing that came down to, that they kept pointing at, is the foundation of the school. The foundation, theman, the one thing that came down to, that they kept pointing at, is the foundation of the school. The foundation, the foundation, the foundation. It's too expensive. And so you can see Armstrong in there, Carpenter in there, the two middle schools, but Foreman was recommended to be rebuilt by the community.

So you had the community members getting together, and the board will tell you these talking notes over and over and over There's teachers parents community business leaders east central west the community They made the decision well the community made the decision to rebuild that school they toured the school and some of the other meeting notes you can see that and they under the The advice from the district even with the district's said, we would like to consider this one for rebuilding. And so the May 26, 2022 meeting notes show the district coming in and unilaterally overriding that and saying, no, this one we need to move to unaccepted.

And you can see in the verbiage in there that there is an argument to the point where the superintendent has to step in and start providing more reasons and more reasons to close the school but to remove it from consideration. Superintendent commented that the east side of the district should receive more renovations and upgrade from the last bond than the central. Yeah.

So that's why they're not going, that's why they're going to give it to the central. Which is an absurd thing because, so at the same time what they're doing is they're, the fourth school that was up for renovation, Haggard, the district put it as high. So remember, if those critical is the top one, then high comes in second. And the way this works is if you're high, you're not gonna get in. Unless they're gonna raise taxes, which will make your bonds not pass. Gotta be critical. Yeah. So they're like, okay, well actually we want to do this and we don't want to do that other one. Which is, it's totally outside their purview as the administration. Because it's supposed to be a committee. You're asking for community input and then

override if you're overriding it at the end then you don't have community input. Yeah. And that's what happened here because they had a plan to close this but they would never tell you that. And the the the part that's really bad is the order these things were done in. So that was May 2022. The LRFP, the long range facility planning, wasn't established until October 2023, a year and a half later. So that's the one that has all the guidelines for, hey, here's how to make sure that we're doing this in a fair and equitable way.

But they've already signed its death warrant, right? And if they're already willing to come in and put their thumb on the scale like in that meeting we just talked about. They could do it now. They're doing it again. And those two committees have an overlap of about 20%. 20% of the LRFP is made up of the same members

from the bond committee, including the chair, the co-chair, five of the seven subco-chairs. All went from that committee to the other one. Okay, so can you explain to me, I always like this, the reasoning for them? Like that doesn't, the quote I just read of like, well, hadn't done anything in the East in a while, we're going to do something in the East, doesn't really pass. You've looked at their numbers, I'm sure you have a somewhat different take on those numbers.

You're all trying to get to the same thing, right? I don't know if it's a balanced budget, but it's the best number possible. What is it with them? Because for me, when I looked at the situation in Keller, it was very clear what was happening to me, right? Like, I mean, I knew the neighborhood pretty well and it's like okay, they're clearly just trying

to remove what they view as an anchor portion of their city even though it did, I don't know, that was clear to me. This one, what is the? Yeah, this is all budgetary. Like we're being strangled right now from Austin. And I know part of it is that TC has mentioned to me things about like the multifamily building like zoning limitations that

are putting Plano in a bit of a population bind. Yeah the district is or not the district the city is pretty much built out and the public does not have much of a appetite for building new multifamily places. A lot of the city council people are against it and if your city council people are against it it's not gonna happen. And so we have a density problem there. We have a problem with an aging population in a place where we can't build too many more homes. And so kids graduate and then families stay in that house for a while. And then we have a rising home cost, rising property costs around the city means that when those people move out, a house that might have been $200,000

a decade ago is worth $550,000 now. And that's much harder for a family that has like a kindergartner to move in and re-enter that system. So we have declining enrollment. So we do have a problem. And it is, like I said, it's a hard problem to have and one that takes a lot of intention to fix. And we got like 70% of the way there this time around and that's just not good enough for...

What do you mean by that? I mean, the two middle schools make sense. The logic behind closing the regional day school program for the deaf makes sense to some degree. They're moving it to another school and that other school has the footprint to be able to build a new school without closing down the original one, without bulldozing the original one. So you can do them simultaneously, build one, move all the kids over there them instead of having like portables and stuff like that, right? But the the Foreman one it it just doesn't make sense like the the equitability problems aren't are so massive and

So here's here's like another point like so there's two goals here One is what we talked about earlier, when you consolidate these schools, it helps support the programs. Athletics, all down to the deaf situation. Yeah, more like athletics, even like chess club, cheer club, all those things. If you don't have enough students,

you can't have those clubs. If you don't have enough students, you can't have those clubs. Right. So from that standpoint, I think we've done a good thing. We're accomplishing things there. But the other side of it is also money. We're trying to save money. Right. Each one of those middle schools costs over,

like it's around $1.5 million a year in maintenance operation costs to run. Davis costs $450,000 to run. Fore dollars a year in maintenance operation costs to run. Davis costs 450,000 to run. Foreman costs 650,000 to to run. But the process is so bad. So they had two meetings. They had one in May where they announced these plans. And that's, like I said, I'd never participated in the stuff before. So I got the email the night of, watched the meeting the next morning, and part of the meetings, I was so naive at this point, part of the meeting they said,

hey, if you have any questions, dig into the data, this is all data driven, get back to us with your comments about the data. And I was so naive, I believed them at the time. So I put together that 19 page PDF document that I sent you and I sent it to them and they turned around and called a special session to close the schools as quickly as possible. Wow. Like how quick? I sent it on June 4th.

So they're required to post an agenda for any meeting and they have to post it 72 hours before the meeting. So I sent it Tuesday evening and I wasn't trying to be like tactical about it. I didn't know any of this stuff. I was just like, hey, you might want to reconsider these things guys. Just acne all over my face little. Wearing your dad's suit. Yeah. So I hand that report on Tuesday And so Wednesday rolls around, you know, they open up their inbox and they go,

Oh, Oh no. But they can't call a meeting immediately because you can't have them on Saturday or Sunday. Remember there's that you have to be 72 hours. So on Thursday they called one for Monday. On Friday, you can't do Monday because you've got the 72 hours thing. So that's as quickly as possible. And that Monday meeting was moving the ball closer, I suppose?

That's when they closed everything. OK. Which is not the same way that other districts handle this kind of thing. So is there no, how common is like a public referendum on these things? What do you mean exactly by public? Like an actual vote. Oh yeah, no, not common.

The actual vote is the vote for the school board members. The school board, okay. Yeah, I was trying to think of like, if I'd heard of, cause you know, you'll have like the Arlington, the stadium thing, right? You'll vote on that. Yeah, yeah, those are bond elections, right? Yeah, bond, I just didn't know if,

I guess also the bond election is also sort of implicitly voting for or not voting for this or that. Yeah, those have a lot more things put together usually. Like some of them aren't, some of them they take out single things and put them on their own thing. You're talking about pork? Yeah, so like in that May 26th one they they put a item in there that was a 130 million dollar, they call it an event center. I like to call it a Coliseum. I saw that in there. Yeah. Yeah so they have like graduation here in Plano instead of renting out the star or whatever and have basketball games and

they also so and it'll bring in money and it'll be cost savings because we don't have to to Pay rent. Yeah pay rent. Yeah pay for events at other places So it'll bring in money, it'll be cost savings because we don't have to... Pay rent. Yeah, pay rent. Yeah, pay for events at other places. And we'll sell concessions and we'll rent it out to other people. We can have like concerts here or whatever,

be it something the community can use. But they're accounting for it, said that it would be a negative cash proposal, negative half million dollars. So half million dollar operating cost and 130 million dollars of bond money for. Half a million a year annual loss? Half a million a year.

Wow, and. Which, an elementary school. Yeah, wow. And then 130 million dollars from the bond budget. And the way the bond allotments essentially works is you have the ceiling of money that you can debt you can service and if you go over some point it raises the interest in sinking tax rates or ins tax rates so that would be a definite like tax raise. Yeah. So they never do that.

They don't want, because it won't pass. The public won't pass a tax raise. None of this time they don't have the appetite for it. So you have this like fixed bucket of money that you can put all these projects in and you've got this giant $130 million event center in there that eventually got voted down because people don't want it. But that's why I was talking earlier about, well why not just let foremen, the rebuilding foremen, be in this this pool of things that to be considered

and see if maybe it edges out the event center or something like that. Yeah, that would make a lot more sense from a democracy standpoint. But yeah, okay, so I wanted to get into the, I don't know, the horse racy part of it. From that summer on, like, were you in relationships with these people? Can I do one more thing before we move on? Because you were talking about public referendums. And the second closest thing that they have is these school board meetings where they close schools, right? Like, they closed my elementary school in Coppell. It was there 99 years, Pinkerton Elementary.

You'd think they'd give it one more, you know? Just get it over the hump. They had four school board meetings, three work sessions and then the open session where they closed the school. The room was packed every night. The one where they closed the school, the room was packed every night. The one where they closed the school they had 56 people show up and that's closing one elementary school in a city that's one-third the size of Plano. And you can see the same thing you look at Allen closed schools recently Richardson closed schools recently and you look at the boardroom packed you look at the public comment hours and hours of it. You're gonna take a guess at how many people got to speak at the Plano meeting? Wow. I can show you because it fits on two of my hands.

So they left nine speakers. Nine speakers, eight adults and a child. Because also when they called that special session, every other meeting before there's this protocol where you sign up the day of the meeting for a normal session and the day before for a special session. This one, remember I said they sent out the email on Thursday, they posted the agenda on Thursday, sent out the email at 1130 a.m. and said you had to sign up by five o'clock that day. Wow, feels intentional. Yes, feels like intentionally suppressing public comment doesn't it and it worked there was a lot of people in the room, but only nine of them got to speak because I Mean everyone else might have had a job. Yeah, I feel like you've got to bring that up, too

Yeah, no, that's that's compelling. So yeah, no, I guess that gets into how you've been received like have you had conversations with any of these people? I mean, it seems pretty obvious that they fast-tracked the process in response to your submission. So what's it been like? Yeah, so how did you pick, if it's an out-large district, how did you pick the spot? Yeah, let's start with that one. So there's four seats that are up. There's two of them that are being abdicated. The field bearer is leaving. And then when I was filing my paperwork, there were two incumbents that were running unopposed at that point. And I picked the president of the board who's been there for 15 years. So the hardest race out of those four, because I think it'll do the most good when you're talking about like a

complacency issue, this is where we start. So. Yeah, well that's an interesting strategy. I mean, obviously it's bold, takes gumption, but it's also kind of like, look, the way I would look at that is like, I'm going to prepare and attempt to execute

to my peak no matter what mm-hmm and if I think that's pretty high I might as well just apply it to the toughest draw like it's not gonna change yeah it's not like if you were like I'm gonna try to see if I can find somebody vulnerable you would do it any different so it's like if you're already gonna put the pedal down you're like I'm just gonna go for the biggest and that's the the mechanism outcome I can get the mechanism for when you have a problem with an elected official is to unseat them.

So, that's what I'm going for. Okay, so how quick, when did you make this known? Let me put it this way, when did she know? February. Okay. Yeah, she filed two minutes after the open date for. So all you have to do to run for school board is fill out about three pages of paperwork, go down to the city hall and get it notarized.

And so when you get it notarized, there's a timestamp on there. So the door is open at 930, and hers is timestamped 932, like the first day. It's a veteran. Yeah. I waited a couple weeks to see if anyone else would jump in instead. I would much rather just be supporting someone who I think is like-minded but has a better background. Not better background, I don't want to neg myself,

but a background with more experience. That's easily the hardest thing I have going for me, is convincing people that this guy that's less than 40 years old is gonna show up and do a better job than someone who's been there for 15 years. That's easily the biggest hill I have to climb. That one and the community meetings. What about the community meetings?

Whatever you were referencing earlier of not being your strong suit. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, the public forums. Public forum, yeah. That just is not something I've done before and it's something that if you've been doing this for 15 years, you've definitely been standing up in front of these crowds and telling people exactly what they want to hear. And so are you, in that situation, when you say public comment, it's the normal, you're

at Elector and seven of them are up there or are there open discussions? So yeah, those are two different things. The public comment that we talked about is exactly what you described. It's the the dais. They have it's another thing drives me crazy about the Plano meetings is they're like raised like four feet off the ground. It's a federal judge. It's very funny. I've seen it. Other districts they just sit at tables. Anyway the dais has the seven school board members and then the heads of the administration, the superintendent and the handful of deputy superintendents

and the chief of staff. That's what public common is. So you get up there, you get your three minutes, next person comes and get three minutes. I'm talking about public forums that are things that are put on by different entities around the area specifically for the election. So hey, come up and see the candidates

and we'll ask them five questions. Okay, just the town hall-y type. Well, town hall would imply that it's like put on by the government itself, right? So these are like, they'll happen in churches and in libraries and like I had one the other day at a country club. It's a little too on the nose, but sure.

Okay. So yeah, I think we're thinking of the same thing. Yeah. But this, this one is just the candidates getting up there and talking about themselves where public comment is the public coming and talking to the school board. Okay. So how many of those have you held? I mean held zero, but I've been, it's I think four at this point. One on Zoom and three in person. What do you mean then?

If you didn't hold them, what do you mean? I didn't hold them, I didn't put them on. So they're different, like the League of Women Voters put on one. Okay, and they invite you? Yeah. Or do you contact them? Yeah, you put our email address in that form I was talking about earlier.

And then it gets posted. And they all start reaching out. Okay, they distribute for you, that's cool Do they it was your opponent there? Yeah, she's been at two of them. Okay And one's gone. Well, and then the other one the one of the country club was my first time In person. Yeah, really walking away shaking my head and going like no no not first time in person but first time that I was like they're like I That didn't I wish I was walking out of there.

I wish I wasn't here right now. Yeah, yeah. It's not going to be bad 1,000. Yeah, for sure. It's interesting, and I don't know how much you want to. Probably the answer is zero, but obviously there are parallels to the national political scene. Right?

It's not new. It's not new. Probably late in the game, but in the last 15-20 years, data is a much bigger part of the political discussion. And obviously you see that culminating with what is happening with Doge. And whether you agree with the aims of that or not, just the idea that somebody who understands data can have a level of trust from the public is interesting to me. Yeah, it's generally well received

when I get that platform of here's my background. People like it. And I think people work with it. There's a guy at their job who works with it. I feel like your data guy is now that is like the is like the IT guy on steroids now It's like this guy knows stuff that we don't and it seems to make everything work better And so I think that you're talking to a generation of people who are not spooked by this idea And it's it's nice showing up at the World Series ring too that plays well. Yeah for sure this much data for sure

small market folks Yeah, so I don't know I think that that's a selling point you don't have to use the name, but it can be pretty clear I think what you're talking about when it's like look. This is just this is the dispassionate For the parts that are dispassionate case case for why this is a better idea. And then also, these kids are literally going to miss the best meal of their day. And for those who are dealing with a hearing disability, their lives are going to be demonstrably worse. Which way do you want it to be?

They are transferring that program. The kids aren't losing that program. They're just losing part of their community. The familiarity of it, too. I mean, in general, it's pretty obvious. If you've got people who are already at a disadvantage in learning, further exacerbating that should be avoided at all costs.

Right. And that's not me doing a hypothetical. Doesn't go that way all the time, though. This is not me hypothetically making that up too. This is from public comment, from the people in that community. And then the district turns around and does like multiple Q&A sessions at the school

to tell them why they shouldn't be feeling this way. And of course, they still feel this way. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, TC, our friend TC referenced to me the other day, the Irving school boards that the Sands was a part of, the corporation, the Adelson's had people there. And it's a weird state, it's a weird comment on society where we still do a lot of the stuff where you're making your voice heard, it's just that it feels now purely performative

at times. Like there were people, I think Jasmine even asked the question of, in that case of, you know, Patrick Dumont doesn't have the public's trust, you know, because of this and that and this and that, which is a true statement. Like even though it's, I suppose, an opinion, I would say the polling would back it up. And the respondent simply said I don't agree I

think the public does trust them and then they moved on. Next. So that's what that's what that feels like sometimes is that you just you plan to solicit comment from people that comment is public and then you publicly simply choose the other option it's just yeah it's it's deflating. Yeah, you don't have to bring it up at all. Yeah, exactly. And then Plano has their meetings structured in a wild way. So the first thing that happens is the public comment. So everyone can come up and get their three minutes. And then they move to what's called closed session. So everyone from the dais moves into a room in the back with their lawyers and they talk about lawyer-y stuff for sometimes up to two hours. Then they come back and talk about

stuff. They talk about what's on the rest of the agenda and that the public just leaves during the two-hour break. Of course they do. They're not just gonna sit there for two hours. Then they'll go through their entire agenda and then at the end is where you can sign up for non-agenda items. So you can talk about whatever you want but that's often at 11 o'clock at night, one in the morning. And that is a unique structure. Yes. Yes, it is. Like, for example, Richardson starts off with a closed session.

So they go and talk to their lawyer and stuff, and then they come out at the appointed time that the meeting is supposed to start and then do the whole meeting in front of everyone and go home. Yeah, I think a just simple why do we do it that way question could be posed. I've posed it in one of these forums. Is that what resulted in things? My opponent took out a notebook and said,

that's a good point, and wrote it down. And the next couple meetings after that, put together like this still. OK, it feels very similar to what we were just talking about. But that's interesting that it's got fake wrote down. I've got one more thing that I think that you'll find interesting. And it's that the buddy-buddiness is,

like I mentioned, I did not have a great showing at that country club forum, the rotary club forum the other day. And it's because I've got three people running against me. I have one opponent, but one of those seats that's been given up, there's a hand-picked successor that has like full support. And then- Of your opponent, I imagine.

Yeah, full support of my opponent. Like they'll sit there and pass notes to each other. And that's you said unopposed? The unopposed person also showed up to a forum like this is a we're getting to know the candidates here you're going to win. What are you doing here? Well the answer to what are you doing here is all three of them counter pointing me. Wow. And bringing up up lack of experience and all this stuff. So every question if you get like three minutes, I get three and essentially my opponent gets nine. Wow, that's interesting.

So I have to make all my points like bulletproof and digestible and get them out there as fast as possible because they're going to get attacked from the other side three times over. Wow, that's interesting. Are there videos of these? There are some of them. There's not one of that one that I'm aware of. But yeah, the legal women voters one, that video is available.

Collin County Votes did one where it's asynchronous. Everyone showed up and just talked to a camera in front of a green screen. I think it did really well on that one. I can share you the links if you want to put them in the description or whatever. Definitely, yeah. Well, closing remarks and where to send people.

Yeah, closing remarks, this is important. It's hard to do and it's really stressing me out. So I'd really like support at the form of in the ballot box or just reaching out. You can email me at harperforpisd.gmail.com if you want to, if anything about this conversation stood out to you and you want to figure out how to donate your time or you know just send a couple bucks to the campaign. Can I ask a really silly question is it the digit four or the word four spelt out? F-O-R. Okay Harper F-O-R-P-I-S-D. Okay got it. At gmail.com. No I mean I think it's uh I think it's awesome man I think it's you know it relates it hits on a lot of levels. Again early voting starts April 22nd get out there get it done and then the

election ends on May 3rd so make sure you get it done by then. It's a Saturday that's a Saturday election a lot of people aren't used to that in these off cycle ones. Okay yeah I think as a dad you know it's it's it's doing something a lot of us wish we could do and I'd like to think that if I was in a situation, a lot of us would like to think, listening, that if they were gonna close our kids' school and there was anything we could do about it, if we had the means to do so, we would go all in

and we would go balls out to try to keep it from happening. And I think it's really cool you have the passion and desire to do it, but also, I probably wouldn't be talking to you if you were just some regular shmegular candidate, but I think you have an interesting angle. I mean you have a really interesting angle. As you said, it's not your forte to have to get out and schmooze. My forte is the actual work, right? Yeah. Sit down, dig into something, and don't give up until I'm done with it.

For those of you who don't know him, you probably figured this out with his job description. Harper has zero douchebag in him. So he's not a BSer. And so that's why, when he told me he was running, I was like, ah, this is going to be an interesting ride. And then the more I thought about it, it's like, well, it's not that he's the smartest person in the room.

It's just that he knows how to help the most. Yeah. The line I use is I'm a parent, not a politician. And that's why also if I get up there, the zero douchebag also comes with zero BS taken in. Yes. Well, I'm happy for you even to be on this journey and thanks for giving us your time All right. Thanks for having me

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