Small schools don’t need extra cash across the board

As district grapples with budget deficit, we must prioritize those who require the most help

The breaking news hasn’t been great for our underserved communities in the Houston Independent School District.

Last week, Houston Chronicle reporter Shelby Webb looked at the politically charged issue of school choice and the challenges faced by students of color in our racially and geographically isolated community.

On Monday, Dr. Brian Holzman of Rice’s Kinder Institute published a study that found especially low rates of postsecondary education attainment among Latino graduates.

Then on Tuesday, Houston Chronicle reporter Jacob Carpenter broke the news about Texas and HISD slipping in their U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress standings. The conclusions were, in their totality, disappointing and show that the achievement gap has remained resistant to new programing, tools, teaching techniques and leadership.

Against this backdrop, HISD needs to make the right call as it budgets for next year. This means providing broad-based support for all our schools and targeting those who need the most help. But that’s not what they’re proposing.

While the administration has temporarily shelved a plan to centralize and standardize programming and funding, it is still required to make changes that incorporate a $115 million budget deficit. So far, the district has proposed achieving this, in part, by cutting $90 from the amount of money allocated to each student. It has also proposed bolstering support to small schools by more than doubling the “small school subsidies” that give extra dollars to schools with small populations (fewer than 500 students for elementary and magnet schools, 750 students for middle schools, 1,000 for high schools).

Cutting $90 from every student’s allocation in the district and diverting these dollars to small schools, regardless of their function or purpose, is the wrong choice and only increases inequity in a district that is already struggling to balance the needs of all of its students.

The $90 cut from the approximately $3,500 allocated to each student every year means different things for different campuses.

Literature on the subject shows that the more concentrated the pocket of poverty, the more expensive it is to educate students. So for the more than 110 campuses that have populations that are at or over 90 percent economically disadvantaged, the cuts will pose a serious challenge for an already struggling population.

However, for the magnet schools that are permitted to congregate higher-income students and are awarded up to $1,500-per-student to provide extra educational opportunities, the financial hit of $90-per-student will matter much less.

Additionally, the shift of resources to the small school subsidies will further exacerbate the inequitable dollar allocation in our district.

This subsidy was originally proposed by Superintendent Abe Saavedra in 2006, when nearly half of the small schools eligible for the stipend failed to meet state standards. It exists so that small struggling schools aren’t disadvantaged by their inability to afford the basics because of their size. For example, a librarian at a school with a large population might cost $20 from each student’s allocation, but at a smaller school might cost $100 or more, leaving less for other educational needs.

While some of the schools currently eligible for the subsidy are struggling, others — our Early Colleges and Early Childhood Centers, for example — have needs different from those of our comprehensive schools. Many are simply operating at or near capacity and have no real option to grow to a size that would make the small school subsidy unnecessary.

While it’s true that the money for the budget deficit has to come from somewhere, all news points to the fact that we are failing our most vulnerable populations. Our focus and priority needs to be protecting allocations to these students. We should look to the administration first to absorb the necessary cuts, then we need to have difficult discussions in our community about extra educational opportunities and resource allocation. We need to make important decisions based on what is best for all students in our community no matter how politically fraught. We must make decreasing the achievement gap a priority in our district, so that the headlines we’ve read this week can be replaced with news celebrating the positive achievements of all students in HISD.