Complaint Review: John H. Reagan High School - Austin Texas

John H. Reagan has a  noble motto: "Not Without Honor."

They should change it to Not With A Relevant Education -- unless of course you mean the kind of education that is relevant to living in PRISON because that has always been what they taught the best here.

This place sort of looks like a prison too. With narrow vertical slits  for "windows" and thick, ugly-looking walls. Just ugly.Period.

Johnson High School which was recently shut down for chronic academic failure and re-purposed  ( which means they changed the name and shuffled a few sleight of hand tricks but it is still in the same rotten neighborhood) appears to have been designed by the same sorry architect. This guy was really in to building prisons because that is exactly what this place looks like! And this "abandon hope all you who enter here" atmosphere is contagious, to the students who are psychologically and emotionally beat down, teachers who burn out and staff who always have to watch their back.

Reagan has a serious legacy of  winning sports and at least four or five FOOTBALL STATE CHAMPIONSHIPS which is probably why it hasn't been closed and re-purposed by now, this after all being Texas. Several members of those early teams went on to great things like the NFL and county offices and success in life that football guys tend to have here.

The atmosphere inside is threatening with Bloods versus Crips, Latin Kings v. other various gangs designed as Car Clubs. If you are Anglo, you keep your head down and your back to the wall and don't look at anybody in the eyes and hope you can survived without being beat down or stabbed.

Am African American female student was stabbed to death on the Reagan campus by her overly possessive, psychopathic African American boyfriend after he had pushed the white female student he used to date down some stairs in the same school but nothing was done about him.

There are a lot of other incidents that go unreported like extortion, drug use and drug dealing and you better keep your pie hole shut or you will get beat down  and worse if you stick your nose into other people's business.

Fear, a quiet desperation that there is nowhere you can turn and nobody you can talk to reigns here. Faculty and staff just basically come for their pay checks and are not going to do anything above and beyond.

I can remember being told that education was just a waste of time for women because they would get pregnant and end up on welfare and  the men would just end up in jail or prison. That was my so-called senior advising.

Forget learning anything.

I had to take a summer school class because I kept failing geometry. Our teacher was the head football coach for the regular semester and he was more concerned about training the football team and ordering new equipment.  The only reason I passed was I was in the summer school class with most of the football players who were also not learning any geometry and several of them broke into the office of the coach and stole all of the tests out of his test file and had them xeroxed and back in the file and they gave me copies so I wouldn't tell on them. I knew what happened to snitches at that school and to get test questions with answers is a bonus. The first and only tie I ever passed a geometry class in my life.

Forget senjor prom and senior trip. The school had just integrated and the faculty and staff who had tossed around the  n- word and "greaser" word to refer to people like me like it was small change did not want white women dancing with the n-words or those n-word females dropping babies all over the campus. That is what they said.

They even called in local law enforcement to deal with "the problem." making the place more like a jail or prison.

We students couldn't understand what the problem was and all of us just wanted to do our time and get out of there alive. no fond memories and no class reunion has ever been held for us to my knowledge.

Now that Reagan is predominantly African American and Hispanic, i can see those crew cut bigots eternally rolling over in their graves at the thought.

There was a huge riot in 1972 or 1973 that has conveniently been "forgotten" by local historians but I remember it very well. In fact, you did not go to school without a straight razor, an ice pick or a sharpened screw driver back then because of the bullies and the gang rivalry --kickers, stoners and jocks --white trash versus black trash.

Now, all of the major car clubs that are really gangs and the usual crips and bloods. Bloods seem to be winning.

Yes, it was very much like a prison.

Kids were doing drugs and fighting back then and nowadays they are allegedly driving fancy tricked out cars to campus bought with drug money proceeds.

There is a child development center for all of the unwed mothers so that maybe their children might be grounded in some sort of values.

The school apparently has gotten its last good chance to bring up the academically unacceptable ratings or it is going to be closed and re-purposed.

This place should have been razed to the ground years ago and sold for condos or a shopping center. Maybe it would give the Austin Independent School District  a cure for their  chronic budget deficit and get even with some of the money that they waste ostensibly trying to educate the children.

If you are a parent and you want the best public education for your child in Austin,Texas --do not send your child to John H. Reagan High School and its (bottom) feeder school Pearce Intermediate School. Your child has enough to worry about without  requiring treatments for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder nearly the same that combat veterans on repeated deployments sustain.

This sorry excuse for a school --indoctrination prison camp --should have been closed years ago but I don't think parents and principals of other schools want these people bringing down the GPA and academic standards of their schools either.

Ironically, the mascot for Reagan is a Raider and the namesake of the school is a former Texas politician who fought for the Confederacy and owned slaves,LOL