AUSTIN, Texas — It’s been two years since Austin ISD voters overwhelmingly approved a historic $2.4 billion bond package that aimed to improve and modernize campuses.
Thanks to that bond proposition, all Austin ISD high school athletic fields were due for big upgrades with artificial turf installed instead.
However, some parents say they’re still waiting to see the results. That includes Damon Flowers, who has three kids who all play sports at McCallum High School.
Flowers said it seems like lately, he spends just as much time as they do on the field. He and other volunteer parents from the booster club have been paying out of pocket and donating time to maintain the athletic field since the summer.
The parents have purchased hoses and sprinklers to prepare the field for football practices. Despite voters approving the district’s bond proposition in 2022, Flowers said they haven’t seen any of that money get spent on the field. Without the help of parents, the field deteriorates.
“When the district doesn’t provide any funding whatsoever, that field very quickly turns into dirt,” Flowers said. “It becomes very compacted and that leads to injuries for players. For instance, we’ve had a couple players that have had leg injuries, broken bones … due to the condition of the field.”
Flowers said the soccer booster club has spent at least $2,300 while the football booster club spent $3,000 to maintain the field. While he and the other parents don’t mind helping, they don’t know how long they’ll have to do it.
A frustrated Flowers said they already pay money to attend sporting events on top of maintaining the field and paying taxes for the bond.
“It’s just frustrating that things don’t seem to be moving forward,” Flowers said.
So, what’s the holdup?
The district said they’ve actually made progress on the bond projects. In the last two years, Austin ISD completed about four open concepts that students can move into next school year and have 37 fence projects completed or near completion.
“Eighteen projects either completed or in construction by the fall of next year … That is an enormous amount of work to get through the design phase, through the permitting process and into construction,” Austin ISD Executive Director of Construction Management Michael Mann said.
The 2022 bond project must be completed in five to six years. According to Mann, the district is trying to coordinate work on more than 113 campuses, so it’s a lot to juggle and schedule.
Mann said not every school gets hit at the same time, which is why parents could be seeing a lack of progress at their campus.
“There’ll be complications we might run into with permitting or with design, so some things might actually shift a little bit, and so there are things that will change,” Mann said. “We talk in those broad chunks just because of that variability through the process of trying to nail down a specific date at the very beginning of a bond that’s gonna take six years. It would be pretty difficult, and it would probably be overpromising and under-delivering.”
Mann also said Austin ISD has regular maintenance done to their athletic fields, but they thank parents for going above and beyond, and for being patient. As for the artificial turf, he said it’s coming sooner rather than later.
“Our anticipation is that by the end of this school year– the end of this semester– that we will have permits on basically all of our fields,” Mann said.
All projects aimed at installing artificial turf are projected to wrap up by the end of 2025 and some in early 2026. However, some schools like McCallum still have some floodplain permitting issues that have to be worked out. So results for some may come later.
According to Mann, Austin ISD has a bond schedule online for people to keep an eye on things.