02/20/2025
Long post about the Texas House School funding bill today:
The House Bill proposes a $220 increase in the student allotment annually. Ector County has approximately 33,400 students. That would bring in an extra $7.2 million per year to ECISD.
Oh and out of that money 40% would have to go to teacher raises. There are almost 1800 teachers in ECISD. That means if ECISD used 100% of the increased funds on teacher raises, each teacher would get around $4000 annually (which is less than was promised after the last session and supposedly the money set aside for teacher raises after the last session is still sitting there gaining interest. Where is that money??). If ECISD gives the 40%, that would only leave $4.3 million extra for all other operating costs. Teachers would get an average raise of $1791 a year, which is under 3%.
Statewide there are 5.5 million students. So the House would give the public schools and extra $1.2 billion to spread around 5.5 million students.
There is a separate bill that sets aside $1 billion for educational savings accounts. 100,000 students will be eligible for those.
$1.2 billion for 5.5 million public school students and $1 billion for 100,000 students getting vouchers.
I will admit that I am not a math teachers, so my numbers may be off a little, but something is woefully wrong with these numbers.
One last point: The cumulative inflation since 2019 is 23%. Schools have gotten zero increase in the basic allotment since 2019, but the new proposal is for a 3.5% increase. That means the schools would still be 20% behind the inflation that has occurred since 2019, and there is a darn good chance the inflation rate this year will be above 3.5%. This entire bump would be eaten away by the end of the year by inflation.
