Tyler TX — At Monday night's Tyler ISD board meeting, the board opened things up for discussion about a new bond proposal.

Once they did, they got an earful.

Officials from Grassroots America: We the People, made it very clear that before spending more money for new programs, they need to fix the problems that are already there.

At Monday night's meeting, the director of Grassroots America: We the People, Joann Fleming, said academics are the bigger issue and the board has a moral obligation to the community to get that right first.

Fleming says, according to statistics from 1997, 52% of Robert E. Lee grads were not college ready and the same was true for 80% of John Tyler graduates.

She said, "I wish today that I could tell that those statistics have improved. But you see I can't cause the district didn't follow through with this promise to the community."

We spoke with Grassroots member, Rick Eisenbach, who told KETK about a covenant that was developed between the local colleges in Tyler back in 2001.

He said, "The covenant was entered into in order to measure and track preparedness for college and those percentages that were mentioned by Joann were the percentages that were determined back then that were not prepared for freshman classes. "

Although they were unavailable to comment today, in Monday night's meeting TISD said they welcome Grassroots' input and will try to answer the questions that they were presented.

He said that they need to, "Put a plan in place, because what's happened was that plan that was put in place in 2001 has been abandoned and it had great promise."

He also said that TISD is graduating young people who are not college ready and it isn't fair to those students.