On the November 5th ballot, a proposition will be put to vote to either raise school funding and provide additional resources, or let teachers work with a shrinking amount of money and prep time with no salary increase. This depends on whether Austin residents vote in support of the Austin Independent School District’s (AISD) Proposition A (Prop A) to increase funding for public schools.
Prop A is a funding proposal approved by the AISD Board of Trustees that would raise property tax rates and provide AISD with an additional 41 million dollars annually. Austin residents will vote in the tax rate election to determine if the proposal will go into effect. This would help cover public school budgets, specifically, personal and staff salary costs. Kathryn Whitley, AISD Board Member, has been working on this proposal to help increase funding for AISD schools. She explained that Prop A is a necessity to remedy a lack of state funding.
“Austin ISD has had to continually make cuts because of underfunding from the state taxes,” Whitley said. “Texas is 49th out of 50 states in per-person funding. During the previous legislative session, the schools needed $1,000 per student in increased per-pupil funding just to keep up with inflation.”
Per-pupil funding is a crucial aspect of district budgeting as that determines how much a school gets for each student in attendance. As a former teacher in Round Rock ISD, a smaller school district, she stressed the importance of having adequate resources for educators to do their jobs.
“I taught in high school, middle school, and in elementary school, and there’s just so much that our educators want to do for our students,” Whitley said. “They do an amazing job with so few resources.”
Furthermore, Whitley added that the lack of adequate resources can be exacerbated by inflation, which causes higher prices. This means the same budget from one year might not be enough for the next.
“Inflation has an impact on school cost, and it should have an impact on school funding,” Whitley said. “But the state is not required to increase funding to us.”
Echoing this, Marc Karch, an economics teacher at LASA, added that inflation has large effects on budgets. Specifically, he explained that it can hurt an institution’s ability to pay back debt. Karch also mentioned that financing school debt may become an issue. He noted that as the deficit increases, it costs more to pay it back.
“We have to remember that each year AISD spends about a quarter of a billion dollars in just interest payments on its debt,” Karch said. “To put it another way, that is about one billion dollars over four years.”
LASA principal Stacia Crescenzi expressed that new funding is vital for many Austin schools to continue their operations. According to Crecenzi, this money is important to pay for teachers, librarians, and counselors, as well as other resources such as books or equipment.
“I don’t think there is a school in Texas, definitely no school within the Austin Independent School District, that doesn’t desperately need more revenue to use in its both staffing and non-staffing budgets,” Crescenzi said.
According to Crescenzi, without more funding, LASA teachers may have to teach seven out of eight class periods instead of only six. This could overburden them when grading assessments by cutting into planning periods, and it increases the number of tests each teacher has to grade.
“You are forcing teachers to do more at home,” Crescenzi said. “In districts that have done this, you see a lot more scantrons, assessments that are very shallow in nature, as opposed to short answers or essays.”
Ultimately, Whitley stressed that she sees this funding of public schools and education as an investment in the future. Providing resources for our schools can help children learn and grow into better citizens.
“This is an investment in our students, and we have to do it to keep our teachers in the classroom,” Whitley said. “Absolutely it is unacceptable to be 49th out of 50 states in funding for public education.”
