Education
Bob Popinski discusses Texas public school funding challenges Amid high operating costs and stagnant state funding, public school districts across Texas have adopted budget shortfalls for fiscal year 2024-25. Last year, public education advocates urged law- makers to increase the basic allotment—which is the base amount of money schools receive per student annually and has not changed since 2019, when it was raised to $6,160. Community Impact interviewed Bob Popinski, the senior policy director for education policy nonprofit Raise Your Hand Texas, to learn more. How are Texas public schools funded? Right now, Texas is in the bottom 10 [states] for per-student funding. We’re more than $4,000 below the national average, according to a new National Education Association report.
[Texas uses] what is known as an equalized system, where the Legislature sets the amount of per-student funding and a district is guaranteed that amount. [District] revenue comes from local property taxes and general revenue from the state. On average, when you look at per-student fund- ing across the state, the funding that actually gets down into the classrooms—that pays for day-to-day operations like teachers and cafeteria workers and bus drivers and school principals—is roughly $10,000 per student, on average, across the state. Why are so many districts facing high budget shortfalls? Since 2019, the last time we saw any increase to our school funding formulas, inflation has gone up 22%. School districts are operating at roughly a $1,400 deficit from where they were in 2019. When you look at the basic allotment—[which is] kind of the building block for our school funding formula—it’s at $6,160, and that hasn’t been updated since 2019. Federal stimulus funding is ending. And school districts knew that, ... but it doesn’t mean that
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