Katy
"We're a rapid growth district. [We're] growing a couple of thousand or more students a year. [We're] adding elementary schools and junior high schools and a high school on pretty regular cycles. School districts tend to build palaces. And I think that we could have less costly construction. I wouldn't be on the school board if the prior superintendent and the prior school board hadn't stuck [a football] stadium down the throats of the taxpayers. But in the scheme of things, the fact that we built a grand palace does not really affect the taxes or the tax rates that pay teachers, pay bus drivers, pay counselors, pay principals, assistant principals. It doesn't really affect the day to day operations of a school district. Do you really want to tell school districts to do away with band and drill team and football? That is part of the culture. I do believe that there are structural issues in spending in school districts that could be cut back. But the notion that spending is just grossly out of control, in districts like Katy, it's just not true."
George Scott, Public Policy Researcher
Lufkin
"We have 8,000 kids, or there about. And we have about 1,600 employees, over half of which are teachers. 86 percent of our budget is salary driven. And so that's a chunk of your budget every year. Our district pays about 10 to 15,000 less than some of the metropolitan districts do at the same level of experience. So we're competing in a market that we're disadvantaged in. Then, because we are a rural district and our district's pretty big geographically, a large transportation budget. And then, lastly, facilities maintenance, taking care of what we've already got, roofs, air conditioners, computer systems, all of that. You can't do all three every year with the funding level at the state, you've got to ignore one. And once you ignore it, you're behind the curve for life. And you can only hope that something happens along the way, you get some additional funding, you get some additional industry or something that bumps your tax base and then you catch up by taking it out of fund balance. The lack of funding makes it impossible to, say, do a maintenance schedule on a set of buildings. When 86 percent of your budget is salary then you know, you don't have much left to work with to be “inefficient” with. So that's, on a grand scale, what our problems are in a town like Lufkin."
Scott Skelton, School Board President, Lufkin ISD, Founding Partner, Skelton, Slusher, Barnhill, Watkins & Wells, Attorneys at Law
Pflugerville
"Our demographer is projecting that we're going to grow about 700 students a year over the next five years. So that's roughly the size of an elementary school a year. So in any given year we may need more buildings and there is really no state assistance for districts in our situation to address those needs. And there used to be, there used to be existing debt allotment money that used to be received by a lot of the fast growth districts, but our wealth levels have gotten to a point, they just haven't kept up with inflation, and so we just don't get that aid anymore. Well, if the state's not going to kick in for any of that, that puts the burden on the local property tax owner and we have to go out for bonds to pay for those buildings and that's burdensome. We have this thing called 'The Texas Miracle' as Rick Perry used to say, and most of the places where you see where fast growth districts are located are exactly where big companies that were brought into the state ended up locating. Well, they tend to buy houses and have kids and those kids have to go to school. So, we've had this great Texas miracle and we've offered incentives to businesses to come, but we haven't done what we needed to do to pay for the facilities and the infrastructure that are needed in those areas."
Dr. Doug Killian, Superintendent, Pflugerville ISD, Currently serving on the Texas Commission on Public School Finance
Plano
"Shortly after I got elected, we had the luxury of the high school allotment. That gave teachers two periods a day to do planning, on their own, and with others. We had to roll that back though when the legislature cut $5,400,000,000 from the budget. After we had the budget cuts from the state, we had to cut our budget because we had less. Right? So what is it that you cut? We wanted to give the community a choice. So in the 2013-14 school year, we gave our community the choice of deciding whether they wanted us to cut programming or would give us the authority to increase the M & O tax rate by thirteen cents. That was then. We just authorized a $208,000,000 payment to the state to make our state property tax payment. And that's how we look at it. It's something that community didn't vote on, and they don't see, but it's in their tax rate. What a district receives [from the state] is determined based upon their tax rate and their wealth. So what happens is if you're collecting more than the calculation, that's going to be extracted by the state and, “theoretically,” redistributed to others. Theoretically in quotes, because what really happens is that any increase in those recapture payments or taxes from property value growth, simply decrease the state's general revenue fund contribution that is required to finance schools. We call it a shell game. The local property tax payers are not supposed to be the only people paying for education."
Missy Bender, School Board President, Plano ISD, Management Consultant, IBM, Amdahl, and Champion International
San Antonio
"My name is Diego Bernal, I'm the state representative for Texas House District 123 which is the urban core of San Antonio. The four districts that I have attendance zones for socioeconomically are very different. SAISD is one of the poorer districts in the city and the state. Alamo Heights, very, very different, right? Much more well to do, a lot more real and political capital. Then you've got Northeast ISD, which is very much in the middle and Northside ISD, which is very much in the middle. Everyone is strapped for cash, right? There's not enough money to go around. Every educator, every school, every district we've talked to have said they need more money. When you cut close to $5 billion dollars from education less than a decade ago, trust me, you're starting from a very spartan place. When we're talking about Comp Ed money or ELL money, these weights have not been adjusted for three decades. You can't argue with a straight face that we're where we need to be with regard to those populations, especially because during that same time, the Comp Ed population, this is the sort of fancy term for kids on free and reduced lunch, which is the way that we measure poverty right now, that population has doubled in that time. They used to be about 28 percent. Now they're 61 percent. It's not as if we've once overfunded education and then smacked ourselves saying, oh, that was a mistake. So, you know, what's wrong with understanding that resources matter?"
Diego Bernal, State Representative, Texas House District 123, Currently serving on the Texas Commission on Public School Finance