Beto O’Rourke visits Amarillo College during a recent trip to the Texas Panhandle/Provided
By Beto O’Rourke
Last week, I had the opportunity to visit Amarillo College’s Student Advocacy and Resource Center — an extraordinary place designed to combat the high level of student poverty that local educational leaders tell me is the number one obstacle hindering educational attainment and economic development in the Panhandle.
We toured the center’s food pantry, low-cost daycare, and a closet full of donated diapers and baby formula for students with children. I learned that the center had social workers on staff to coach students through financial crises, connect homeless students to housing programs, and address other challenges that may derail a student’s education and future career trajectory.
I had never seen anything like it on a college campus.
After the tour, I sat down with students, teachers, and administrators from Amarillo College and Amarillo ISD. We discussed the local innovation that is helping more people pursue the postgraduate certifications that are going to help Amarillo and its surrounding rural communities combat poverty and compete for the best jobs in America.
It couldn’t be more clear that local leaders are doing their part to achieve those goals, but the only thing missing, they said, was a greater effort from state leaders to meet them halfway.
I saw that very sentiment manifest itself in the days after that meeting.
The day after I left Amarillo, the City Council voted to move forward with a project to expand access to affordable broadband for low-income students—a crucial initiative to help more young people succeed at Amarillo ISD, Amarillo College, and beyond.
But just the day after that, rural telecommunications providers took state leaders to court for defunding the Universal Service Fund, a state-administered fund that supports rural telephone and internet service in places like the Panhandle.
Because state leaders allowed the Universal Service Fund to become depleted, households in the communities surrounding Amarillo could soon see their phone and internet bills go up anywhere between $25-$175 per month.
How can we expect students and families to meet those increased costs?
The crisis with the Universal Service Fund is part and parcel of a broader, concerning trend of state leadership turning their back on rural communities and failing to meet them halfway on the investments needed to make these regions economically competitive.
These West Texas communities produce the food, the fuel, and the fiber that power the rest of the state. They’ve played an outsized role in making Texas the 10th largest economy in the world. Yet state policy too rarely reflects that.
Just look at the way we fund our schools. Texas places too heavy a burden on local taxpayers to fund our public education system, paying on average just 40% of what it costs a local school district to educate our kids. It’s nearly impossible for rural West Texas districts with a smaller tax base to be able to afford to recruit and retain the best and brightest teachers and provide the best programming for their students.
It’s the same story with health care. Because Texas has refused to expand Medicaid—leaving $100 billion in federal health care support on the table—more rural hospitals have closed in Texas than in any other state. One-third of Texas counties lack a hospital—including 10 in the Panhandle alone—and one-fourth have only one doctor or no doctor at all. With these numbers, Texas ranks last in the nation for rural access to care, making it more and more difficult to keep young people in West Texas well enough to pursue an education and fulfilling career.
None of this is right, and it doesn’t have to be this way.
The most important thing I learned from the folks I met with in Amarillo is that local communities know exactly how to overcome their greatest challenges. They just need state leaders to partner with them on the investments needed to guarantee affordable broadband, equitable school funding, and life-saving health care access.
That’s the only way that the Panhandle—and, in turn, the rest of Texas—will thrive.
Beto O’Rourke is a former U.S. Representative from El Paso and a Democratic candidate for Governor of Texas.