Education
BY HANNAH NORTON
Education Edition
2024
Readers, welcome to your annual CI Education Edition! This guide features the latest news updates on K-12 public schools in North San Antonio. All of the stories were written by our team of local journalists, and all of the advertisements are from nearby businesses who support our mission to provide free, useful news—show them your gratitude by supporting them. The interview below is with Bob Popinski, a director at Raise Your Hand Texas, a nonprofit organization that advocates for reforming and raising standards in public education in Texas. In the interview, Popinski explains the funding mechanism of public education in Texas, and he provides insight into why districts are currently facing budget shortfalls. Our cover story on Pages 10-11 explores how those funding struggles are specifically putting pressure on Northside ISD and North East ISD. We look at how those districts are trying to retain talent in the midst of a budget crunch.
What's inside
Facing budget shortfalls, districts up teacher pay (Pages 10-11)
Heather Demere Publisher hdemere@ communityimpact.com
Federal Student Aid application changes, delays lead to decrease in applications (Page 12)
Bob Popinski discusses Texas public school funding challenges Amid high operating costs and stagnant state funding, many public school districts across Texas have adopted budget shortfalls for fiscal year 2024- 25. Last year, public education advocates urged lawmakers to increase the basic allotment—which is the base amount of money schools receive per student and has not changed since 2019. 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 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, 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. 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 are still a lot of programs that are in place to help students with their academic progress that school districts would like to continue, but because that federal stimulus funding is going away, it may not be available to them. There are some school districts out there experi- encing enrollment decline. Think of it this way: 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. What kind of staffing 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.
COURTESY RAISE YOUR HAND TEXAS
School districts are struggling to find certified teachers. In the 2022-23 school year, approximately 15,300 teachers were hired in Texas without certification. That’s a drastic increase, about a 650% increase, from 2010. Hiring uncertified teachers is also causing a lot of turnover. Only about 37% of alt-certified or uncerti- fied teachers are still teaching after five years.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For a longer version, visit communityimpact.com .
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NORTH SAN ANTONIO EDITION
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