Enrollment and attendance determine school funding
one for Dakota to consult right now, except the set of five college handbooks on the bottom shelf of Del Pilar’s bookcase. But they were printed in 2013 and are largely obsolete.
Dakota lets out a groan that feels like it lasts forever. Then he leaves.
At a typical high school, the principal’s office is often a silent, solitary place. But when Del Pilar looks up from her desk on the morning of Oct. 12 — a week after Dakota’s roadblock — the room is pulling double duty as principal’s office and study hall. That’s not uncommon.
In the one year the school had the budget to offer art, it was taught here, with Del Pilar working quietly in the background — her lineup of framed family photos competing with student artists’ works-in-progress. This year, the main focal points are three whiteboards she’s engineered into grids, where she tracks student progress through an improvised system of washi tape and Postit notes.
Del Pilar’s careful not to make too much noise as she stands and walks into the larger reception area just outside her perpetually open door, where first-year teacher Delvin Walker awaits her instructions.
Today, it’s Walker’s turn to block-walk through the neighborhood during his off periods.
The principal smiles at Walker, then she looks down at the copier, placing a sheet of paper on the glass and punching buttons. When she looks back up, the kids who had been working in her office are milling about the reception area.
She lifts a finger. Points. “You need to sit down.” She points again. This time at Dakota. “You need to get your work done.”
Dakota wiggles his knees. “I have to go to the bathroom!”
“Well, then, hurry up.” Del Pilar points to the next student. “Danielle, you have a lot of work to do.” “No, I don’t,” Danielle tries. “Yes, you do. You have Apex work.”
Del Pilar turns back to Walker and the papers she’s copying. From her elephant-like memory, she runs down the long list of community centers that dot the Gulfton neighborhood. They’re still 28 kids shy of the enrollment target with only a few days left before “Snapshot Day” to close the gap and ensure the school keeps its already lean staff.
Some of these neighborhood centers may have leads on kids who haven’t done well elsewhere. They may know families on the verge of giving up, she says. She looks at the copier again. “Let’s do 100 copies,” she says, hitting “Go” and watching it churn out the flyer she’s created, boasting all the ways the school can offer at-risk kids one last shot.
“One hundred?” Walker asks. It’s ambitious to think he can talk to 100 people in the 2½ hours before he has to return to teach fifth period — even for Del Pilar.
But she gives him a look that says, “I don’t have time to think small,” before launching into an enrollment speech Walker has heard before.
“We need 28 more students to get up to 164,” she says as the papers pile up in the copy tray. “Approximately $3,300 comes in per student. So 20 students is $66,000. That’s — a teacher is $55,000. So that’s more than a teacher. I can’t lose teachers because then I won’t have a school. And the classroom would have 40 kids in a class. And we’ll only be able to offer reading and math.”
She sighs. “This is ridiculous! So I need 28 kids.”
Enrollment is just part of Del Pilar’s budget headache. School funding is a complicated formula in Houston, where schools can receive extra dollars for magnet programs and other options Del Pilar is unable to take advantage of. The average HISD school receives $5,700 per student. Middle College? It’s well below that, at $4,982, mostly because of student attendance rates, which have always torpedoed Middle College’s bottom line.
The math is simple: If you have an average daily attendance rate of 100 percent, you receive 100 percent of the funds HISD promises through its per-pupil allocation. If you have lower rates, your income from the district will be prorated.
On average, district schools had a 95.6 percent attendance rate that school year. Middle College’s rate was 72.7 percent. And even that, Del Pilar says, was a miracle.
“Our attendance last year was actually up from the year before,” she says, returning to her office. “And we get in trouble for that — we get fussed at. But like, hello! We’re lucky we get anyone here at all. If a kid has 75 percent attendance here, compared with 0 percent attendance at a traditional school, that should be considered a win. But it’s not.”
She’s on a roll now, addressing all the fears and frustrations that keep her up at night, her hushed voice long gone. “Take Carmen, for example.” The school year started a little over a month ago, but Carmen has already racked up enough absences to put her odds of graduating this January in jeopardy. Most principals likely would have already initiated the withdrawal process, pushing Carmen out the door. But Del Pilar sees every day as a victory when Carmen makes it to her desk to join Daniel and her other classmates in thirdperiod pre-calculus.
Middle College is Carmen’s ninth school. She enrolled in early 2017 as a 17-year-old freshman, to prove to her little brother and sister that she could graduate, after dropping out three years prior when her father was deported and her mother went to work at a bakery for as many hours a week as physically possible to keep the family afloat.
“You know, it’s OK,” she told her mom then, quiet enough that the younger kids wouldn’t hear. “You don’t have anybody. Take me out of school. For as long as you need.”
At the family’s home on a busy street on Houston’s southwest side, Carmen’s a hero. The cherub-cheeked girl who ties her curly hair into a ponytail and pushes up her glasses when it’s time to leap into action. She learned to drive at 14, taking the keys one morning when she couldn’t think of a better way to get her siblings to their elementary school. She’s teaching her 9-year-old brother, Josh, how to cook dinner so he can be self-sufficient someday. And when 11-year-old Dani needs homework help, or a ride and a hand to hold during a school-day doctor’s appointment, Carmen drops everything to help.
But here at school, people don’t look at her with stars in their eyes the way Josh and Dani do. Here, she’s nobody’s hero. She’s the girl missing from the empty desk. The one with the late-again homework. The one no one expects too much from.
“How can you say that getting Carmen here 75 percent of the time — instead of 0 percent — is a bad thing?” Del Pilar asks, throwing her hands up in exasperation.
If Del Pilar could have a school full of Daniels, Dakotas and Carmens, she’d be thrilled. But on Monday, Oct. 23, she’ll settle for a full school.
This is the day she has to submit enrollment numbers to the district so they can make it to the Texas Education Agency by “Snapshot Day” on Friday. And at 9:57 a.m. that Monday, a familiar face walks into the office reception area, looking to enroll.
Del Pilar smiles when the young woman sits down. She’s a former student who withdrew last year and took a job in the linens department at Memorial Hermann Hospital, only to be told a few months later that she’d need to earn a diploma to keep her job.
Del Pilar looks at her sternly. “You were always in the hall. You were never in class; we always had to look for you. Why should I put myself through that again?”
The student locks eyes with Del Pilar. “I’ll be different this time,” she promises. “But I need this for my job. They’ve let me stay without a diploma.” She breaks into a smile. “They say they like my enthusiasm.”
“We never had a problem with your personality,” Del Pilar says, smiling back. “It’s your work ethic.” “I can do this.” Del Pilar takes in those four magic words — the one promise she hopes to unlock in each of her students who have been told they can’t so many times they’ve nearly given up for good.
She adds the student to her roster.
When she sits at her desk at day’s end to tally up her final enrollment figures, she counts 157 students — seven shy of her goal. That leaves a $23,000 gap in her budget.
“We worked our butts off to get what we got,” she says as her fingers whizz around on a calculator. There’s a victory in that. But this is the first time in her career that she’s fallen short on enrollment. And $23,000 isn’t the kind of shortfall that can be fixed by cutting the printer-paper budget. It likely means losing a teacher.
“Honestly,” she mumbles to herself, almost inaudibly. “I don’t know if I can do this.”