Georgetown Edition | September 2024

Education

BY HANNAH NORTON

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 scal year 2024- 25. Last year, public education advocates urged lawmakers to increase the basic allotment—the base amount of money schools receive per student, which has not changed since 2019, when it was raised to $6,160. Community Impact interviewed Bob Popinski, the senior policy director for education policy nonprot 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. When you look at per-student funding 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, ination has gone up 22%. School districts are operating at roughly a $1,400 decit 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 the post-pandemic student achievement loss has gone away. There’s still a lot of programs that are in place to help students with their academic progress that school districts would like to con- tinue, but because that federal stimulus funding is going away, it may not be available to them. In addition to those two major driving factors, there are some school districts out there experi- encing enrollment decline. Think of it this way:

Per-student spending On average, Texas public school districts spent $13,109 per student for the 2022-23 school year. Texas ranks 44th for per-student expenditures out of all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

#50 #49 #48 #47 #46 #45 #44 #43 #42

Alabama Arkansas

$13,484 $13,516

Texas

$12,815 $12,837 $13,109

Florida Arizona

Tennessee

$12,476

Nevada

$12,246

Oklahoma

$11,928

Utah

$11,146

#51 Idaho

$9,808

The national average for per-student expenditures is $17,493.

SOURCE: NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATIONCOMMUNITY IMPACT

COURTESY RAISE YOUR HAND TEXAS

if every student draws down about $10,000 to pay for teachers, and you lose 10 kids, that is $100,000 that the school district doesn’t have to pay for a teacher salary. But you still have to have a teacher in the classroom, and you still have to have a bus driver, and you still have to be able to turn the lights and the air conditioning on. So those are big, kind of xed costs that a school district doesn’t necessarily control. What kind of stang issues are schools facing, and what can the state do to help? The state needs to implement a lot of the recom- mendations that came from the Teacher Vacancy Task Force report that was issued last year. There were about 24 recommendations in there. A lot of them focused on salary; a lot focused on training and retention of teachers. School districts are struggling to nd certied teachers. In the 2022-23 school year, approxi- mately 15,300 teachers were hired in Texas with- out certication. That’s a drastic increase, about a 650% increase, from 2010. And it’s especially acute in rural and small towns, where nearly 75% of teachers were uncertied. Research shows [hiring uncertied teachers] can have negative consequences on academic achieve- ment. If you have a new teacher that doesn’t have the skills to be ready on day one, obviously your kids aren’t going to be achieving where you want them to be. It’s also causing high turnover. Only about 37% of uncertied teachers are still teaching after ve years. That means over 60% have left before that fth year of teaching.

The Texas State Board of Education will soon approve new textbooks that districts can begin using during the 202526 school year. What does this mean for districts and students? It’s a big decision for school districts, whether to opt in to the statewide curriculum program. The idea behind the law is that the state [can identify] high-quality instructional materials and make them available statewide. If a school district opts in, they can get an additional $40 per student and another $20 to print the materials. [The State Board of Education’s] job is to deter- mine the criteria and quality of those materials. There’s a lot of back and forth with the publishers and with stakeholders [regarding] what needs to be in that program. Once that is fully formed, it really is up to the local school boards and school administrators to see if that is the right t for their district. And if it is, you can draw down additional funding in a time when budgets are tight. But if you have di¡erent community needs and di¡erent community wants, and you’ve spent decades developing your own curriculum and you think it’s high quality, it may not be the right t for [your district].

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For a longer version, visit communityimpact.com .

GEORGETOWN EDITION