Asleep at the Wheel
- Aaron Silva
- 5 hours ago
- 6 min read
How Hern and Clark Funded the Deficit One Sleepy Vote at a Time — and Why They Don’t Deserve to be Re-Elected Trustee
By Aaron Silva, Eanes Parents Unite & Texas Education Project 103
Ivana and I have had two children in Eanes for almost 12 years, and for the first time in memory a trustee published a CFO-level analysis of why our beloved district is in big, big trouble. This problem affects all parents, their children, and our property values. Let me translate what the numbers actually mean — because apparently nobody on the board bothered to.
The $4.6 Million Question
Trustee Catherine Walker — the CFO who beat Heather Sheffield by 35 points — recently published a meticulous nine-year analysis of Eanes ISD staffing costs. Walker is careful, thorough, and deliberately diplomatic. I am not a CFO. I am a CEO, and CEOs are not always diplomatic (unless we have to be). So let me translate what Catherine’s data actually says to the parents, voters and taxpayers in Westlake.
The district’s current salary budget is $82.17 million. According to Trustee Walker, if Eanes had kept the 2017–2018 staffing model and applied only the board-approved raises each year, that number would be $77.57 million. The difference — $4.60 million — has nothing to do with paying teachers more. It is admin positions added, layers created, departments expanded, quietly and incrementally, budget after budget, vote after vote. Teachers left in the cold.
Now here is the number that stopped me cold when I ran my own analysis of Walker’s data: if you add up the cumulative cost of that excess headcount growth since 2017–2018, the total is $32.28 million. That is the amount spent above and beyond what a disciplined, enrollment-aligned staffing model would have cost. Thirty-two million dollars. That would have been nice to have in the bank, wouldn’t it? I know a few teachers who would have liked a piece of that too.
It gets worse. Over this same period, student enrollment declined 10%. Extracurricular and cocurricular payroll more than doubled — from $1.35 million to $2.29 million. We graduated 750 seniors every year while only about 450 new kindergartners came through the door. In any business on earth, when your customer base shrinks by 10%, you do not double your administrative staff. Hern, Clark, Spradley, McMath, and Sheffield either didn’t notice, didn’t care, or lacked the professional experience to connect two data points sitting in the same spreadsheet.
Walker puts it best: “Budgets are an organization’s values expressed in dollars.” For the upcoming 2026–2027 school year the board is still wrestling with a $5.0–$6.0 million deficit — a number, Catherine notes, that is not far off from the staffing-model variance itself. That is not a coincidence. That is a choice.
And just to be clear about whose choice it was: the current 2025–2026 budget is also a deficit — the seventh consecutive deficit budget in Eanes ISD history. Clark and Hern voted for it. The only two trustees who voted against it were Walker and Troy — the two newest members of the board, who apparently hadn’t been drinking the Kool-Aid long enough to go along with it.
Seven years. Seven deficit budgets. Same votes. Same results. Are you getting anxious yet? Keep reading.
This Is Not Complicated. This Is Arithmetic.
I know the incumbents love to tell us these issues are “complicated.” That was Sheffield’s favorite word too, right up until voters complicated her evening on election night.
So let me uncomplicate this for every parent, taxpayer, and voter who deserves a straight answer.
In Texas, every student generates approximately $13,000 in revenue — $6,215 of that stipend tied directly to student attendance. Eanes peaked at 8,174 students in 2019. We are heading toward 6,000 — potentially 5,500 by 2030. However, the Eanes ISD cost structure is still built for 8,000. We will never be 8,000 again. The gap between those two numbers is exactly where your deficit lives — and right-sizing for where we are actually going is the only honest answer.
Every year we delay that honest conversation, another 150 students — and another $2 million in revenue — walk out the door. Automatically. Without anyone voting on it. It just disappears. The transfer student strategy that was supposed to paper over the gap? Dried up. The board’s demographer who said everything was fine? Wrong. The deficit that was supposed to fix itself through “natural attrition?” Still here, and growing. Some strategies age better than others.
The Answer Was Right There. They Drove Right Past the Off Ramp.
Picture this. The Texas Association of School Boards — TASB, an independent body with no dog in the fight — walks into an Eanes board meeting and presents a compensation study. Their findings could not have been clearer:
Eanes teachers were paid 3% below market compared to their peers across Central Texas.
Eanes administrative staff were paid 13% above market.
There it is. Right there on the screen. In a board meeting. In front of Diane Hern and Laura Clark. The teachers who show up every day for your children — underpaid. The administrative layer above them — overpaid by 13%. The solution to the deficit and the teacher attrition crisis, sitting in the same slide deck, handed to them by an independent authority they themselves invited in.
What did they do with it?
They gave teachers a 1% raise. Let that sink in — TASB says your teachers are 3% below market and the board’s response is 1%. They kept adding administrative staff. They voted to kill the beloved Spanish Immersion program that served 700 children. They invented “natural attrition” as a budget strategy — which, as best I can tell, means waiting around hoping people quit so you don’t have to make a real decision. Somewhere in a business school, a professor is weeping. And while all of that was happening, they quietly let die a $210 million endowment opportunity from the Westlake Athletic and Aquatic Center — potentially the largest financial gift in Texas public school history — that could have funded teacher salaries and plugged the deficit for decades.
The answer was right in front of them. They drove right past the off ramp — asleep at the wheel.
So let me ask the question this community deserves answered: Are Hern and Clark working for the teachers and kids — or for the bloated administrative staff that has been growing on their watch for nine years? Because you cannot look at the TASB findings, the Walker analysis, and seven consecutive deficit budgets and conclude that teachers and students were the priority. The numbers don’t lie. The votes don’t lie.
And these two want another shot?
The Sound of Silence
Here is the part that ties it all together. In all the years Diane Hern and Laura Clark have sat on this board — through seven deficit budgets, 20% annual teacher attrition, a shrinking enrollment nobody wanted to talk about, a TASB report they sat on, and a $210 million endowment they let evaporate — have you ever once heard either of them speak publicly or write a single word to this community about what is wrong and what they intend to do about it?
Not a prepared board statement. Not a district talking point. Actually, leveling with this community. Directly. Honestly. A blog post, even. Anything.
I’ll save you the Google search. No.
That silence is not an accident. Trustees have been coached for years to keep their heads down, support the superintendent, deliberate behind closed doors, and smile for the cameras. “Be seen and not heard” is fine governance when everything is running smoothly. It is institutional malpractice when the district has been in a deepening financial calamity for the better part of a decade and the community is being kept in the dark.
Laura Clark has been elected twice — both times unopposed. She has never once had to tell this community an uncomfortable truth to earn her seat. That streak ends May 2nd.
Diane Hern holds four degrees — MIT, UT, Stanford, UT Austin. Her listed occupation is “Community Advocate.” With that arsenal of credentials, she sat on a board that voted for seven consecutive deficit budgets, received a TASB report showing teachers underpaid and administration bloated, and apparently never found the occasion to stand up and say: this is wrong and we are going to fix it.
If you knew how to fix it — why didn’t you?
Two Elections. Five Corrections.
On May 2nd, voters can elect three new trustees in a single day: Jennifer Blackman for Place 2, Swasti Apte for Place 3, and Kate Ivers for Place 1. Three accomplished, business-minded parents — all with children currently enrolled in Eanes ISD — who will walk into that boardroom with the financial fluency, the professional backbone, and the community mandate to ask the questions that Walker’s analysis and the TASB report prove should have been asked years ago.
Electing these three changes the complexion of the board, the communication culture, and who is actually doing the job. No more sleepy votes. No more driving past the off ramp. No more silence.
This is Year One. Next year, James Spradley and Kelly Marwill face voters. Two elections. Five corrections. The math is simple. The mission is clear.
Read Catherine Walker’s full analysis at this link. Then vote like your kids’ school depends on it — because it does.
Early voting: April 20th–28th, 2026 • Election Day: Saturday, May 2nd
If you don’t vote, the wheel stays in the ditch.
Aaron Silva is a Westlake parent and successful business entrepreneur and CEO.
Follow along at silva4eanes.com/blog