Book excerpt: Excerpt from County Unit of School Administration in Texas (a) The Case of Travis County, Texas. Austin, the capital of Texas, is located near the center of Travis County. The western part of Travis County is mountainous and very sparsely settled. The land is very poor. Most of it is used for goat pasture and is rendered to the tax assessor at two dollars per acre. In general, the people are of the mountaineer type and possess much physical hardihood. But most of them are very poor. In the heart of this mountainous territory, just fifteen miles from the magnificent dome of the state capitol at Austin, is the Pleasant Valley School District. In the summer of 1919 the people of the Pleasant Valley community voted bonds to the amount of $2,000 to build a new modern two-room schoolhouse. The people were unanimous in their desire for a better school for their red-blooded mountaineer children. They were simply crying out for better educational facilities. When the bonds reached the Attorney General's office for inspection, they could not be approved. They were rejected because the total taxable wealth of the district was so very small that only $500 in bonds could be legally issued against it. The new schoolhouse was not built. A veritable old stable was provided with a new roof, a new floor, and an extra window or two, and school is being conducted there today. In this district, a fifty-cent school tax produces only $91.83 per year, which is only $4.84 per child of free-school age. On the other hand, in some of the wealthy farming districts in the eastern part of the county, a fifty-cent tax produces more than $20 per child. Adjacent to the Pleasant Valley district are the Cox Springs District, the Travis Peak District and a number of others that are very poor in material wealth. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.