Amid rising inflation, a new legislative session, and the conclusion of the election season, Austin Independent School District (AISD) is dealing with a local problem of its own: budget cuts.
The funding for AISD’s budget comes from local funding via property taxes, state funding, and federal funding through programs like Title One and food services. According to Dr. Jacob Reach, the chief officer for governmental relations and board services for AISD, all three funding sources have stagnated over the last few years. Due to the pandemic and general inflation, the cost of resources that AISD provides has increased even if its revenue has not. Last year, AISD started making multiple cuts at headquarter levels to minimize the effect on schools as reported by KXAN. Although these cuts were a start at addressing the problem, AISD still needs to cut $92 million over three years from its budget to solve its record-high budget deficit.
“They [Texas] set aside $5.5 billion for education that they ended up not spending,” Reach said. “And we’ve all just had to admit reality. We can’t rely on the state. We need to make sure that we have an efficient budget and that we have what we need to serve our students and our schools, and if the state comes and gives us money, then that’s great, then we’ll make sure that we can add on support. But we can’t make decisions hoping the state is going to do something new.”
Reach added that a main method of figuring out the necessary actions to take to address the budget crisis is committee meetings attended by parents, administrators, staff, and Gibson Consulting, AISD’s auditor. In the meetings, the main administrator of the meetings will take the ideas recorded by the communities and adapt the proposals based on what the community is voicing as the main priority.
“It’s important that we listen to all of these ideas, take them all into consideration, and listen to those voices who are most affected by it,” Reach said. “But at the end of the day, staff will make the recommendation to the board on what we need to prioritize and when we need to prioritize, because not only are we talking about what needs to change, but we’re going to do this over a three year period.”
Kimberly Pettigrew, a U.S. History teacher at LASA, attended these committee meetings and recounted that at every meeting they would be broken up into subcommittees, discuss a particular department, and then share their ideas with the larger committee, where it would be recorded and reviewed by an equity rubric. However, Pettigrew explained that the meetings had only five people who worked on the school campuses out of the 35 others who were composed of parents and administration.
“The community input really lacked any sort of everyday staff input,” Pettigrew said. “Honestly, I just don’t think they want community that involved because they know it’s going to impact the classroom, and they know that’s going to push backlash, and I think they’re trying to delay that backlash as long as they can.’”
According to Adriana Cedillo, the Executive Director of Financial Planning at AISD, another method of resolving the deficit is using monitoring strategies by reviewing contracts to see if AISD can get discounts while looking at vacant positions to see if the job could be absorbed by the staff at various AISD locations. Cedillo explained that an expected difficulty in resolving this issue has been creating a coherent idea of what is necessary to prioritize when it comes to budget cuts.
“I will say that people get pretty passionate about their one area, “Cedillo said. “…When you get a lot of ideas in the kitchen, it’s hard to come together as a group to make the best decision. People come with their ideas and opinions, and they want to safeguard their values, and they’re great values, but how do you prioritize?”
Cedillo noted that a big topic when it came to discussing budget cuts is the recapture program headed by the state which takes a majority of AISD’s money and sends it back to the state. She explained that the amount of revenue that is generated by AISD that is sent to the recapture program is enough to fund another district and provide valuable resources to the students.
“It’s a big part because half of our tax collections go back to the state,” Cedillo said. “Envision the dollar. Basically you rip that dollar in half and hand it off to someone else…people talk about, well, what happens if you just don’t pay it? I mean, I think when I first came in, I’m like, yeah, what happens if we don’t pay it? Well, the state can come in and they can take over, they can take over the district, or they can start breaking apart the district.”
Reach explained that the main idea of the recapture program is to facilitate wealth equalization through a funding formula created by the state of Texas which determines how much money each campus should have. In theory, the state uses that money to help support campuses to increase equity among the state.
“In practice the state uses that funding that comes in to help balance their own budget needs,” Reach said. “If they sit there and determine that, okay, this year, it’s going to cost us $50 billion in state aid to give all the districts the money that we need, but we’re getting 20 million in recapture. They say ‘okay, so now I just need 30 million from the budget, and then that other 20 million that originally was budgeted for education, I can go spend that on something else now.’”
According to Cedillo, the main priority in resolving AISD’s budget deficit is minimizing its effect on campuses and the students. She highlighted that a majority of the decisions that are happening right now are equity-driven and measure the long-term impact of these decisions on the students.
“We’ll be doing several sessions with our staff and teachers to make sure that they are notified or can provide feedback on these reductions because although we’re trying our best not to have those reductions impact them, their voices, their voices still matter,” Cedillo said. “Aligning our values to student outcomes, and then also listening, not just the staff, but to the community about these reductions, because it’s their students … So we do want to make sure that their voices are heard.”
