BY HANNAH NORTON
The breakdown
One more thing
Max Rombado, the legislative director for the public school advocacy organization Raise Your Hand Texas, said creating targeted funding allotments can be complicated in a state as large and diverse as Texas. “While the impact may generally be positive, there are a variety of complexities and differences between school districts that might create challenges when you create these guardrails around this money,” Rombado told Community Impact on July 18. He said a larger basic allotment increase would have given Texas public schools “the most flexible funding” because that money can be used for a variety of purposes.
“When we’ve raised the basic allotment only, … we haven’t seen those dollars always driven to the classroom,” Creighton said July 21. “We made sure with our new allotments that we achieve targeted strategies towards what will increase student outcomes and academics, and what will also reward and protect our teachers.”
HB 2 also includes a $55 increase to the base amount of per-student funding schools receive from the state, or the basic allotment, used for needs like purchasing classroom materials and paying teachers. Some school leaders requested a roughly $1,300 basic allotment increase to help schools keep up with inflationary costs.
HB 2 gives schools approximately:
$3.7B for teacher pay raises
$430M for school safety
$1.3B for fixed costs, such as transportation and insurance $850M for special education resources and evaluations
$243M for state-owned instructional materials $200M for teacher preparation and certification
$500M for raises for support staff, including bus drivers and librarians
$153M for career and technical education
The bill also includes a $55 increase to the base per- student funding schools receive, known as the basic allotment.
$433M for early literacy and numeracy
SOURCES: TEXAS LEGISLATURE ONLINE, RAISE YOUR HAND TEXAS/COMMUNITY IMPACT
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