Austin school district does not have highest per-student funding

Statement doesn’t account for federal funds in each district.

An activist made his case against voters approving a record $1 billion Austin school bond proposition in part by saying the school district tops other big Texas districts in per-student funding. We wondered about that. “Austin ISD has the highest taxable property value per student of all school districts in Texas,” Roger Falk of the Travis County Taxpayers Union wrote in a commentary published in the American-Statesman before the bond won voter approval. “It also has the lowest tax rate of all districts in our area.”

Falk then rebutted the school district’s complaints that it suffers under the state’s school-finance system of recapture, which essentially shifts money from districts with strong property tax bases (like Austin) to property-poor districts.

“A major part of its sales pitch is that recapture is killing the district and driving this bond,” Falk wrote. “Recapture, as an argu- ment from the district, actually shows its incompetence, as Austin ISD enjoys the highest per-student funding of all large Texas districts after recapture.”

We’re not fact-checking all that Falk said there. But Falk told us he reached his conclusion about the Austin district having the highest per-student funding among large districts by checking on 2016-17 per-student budgeted spending in a dozen high-enrollment districts starting from a Texas Education Agency website.

From the TEA, we confirmed figures posted for the Austin district showing that the district budgeted $10,949 per student — an amount reached by dividing $906,180,314 shown in Austin Independent School District state, local and federal receipts by its 82,766 students. That dis-