Public schools to get state funds
But terms put added pressure on superintendents
Texas public schools will receive state funding at their prepandemic enrollment levels through the end of the school year to avoid financial damage caused by lost students, Gov. Greg Abbott announced Thursday.
But the terms of the new funding extension added to the state’s pressure on superintendents to keep kids in classrooms.
Schools receive funding based on average daily attendance, which has taken a hit in the past year by the upheaval caused by the coronavirus, as thousands of students have been chronically absent from their classes.
The Texas Education Agency already had extended funding for the first 18 weeks of the current school year based on attendance in the previous year, through a provision called “hold harmless.”
But that guarantee expired around the start of the new year for most districts, leaving school leaders in the dark about how much funding they would continue to receive as they contended with unprecedented pandemic-related expenses.
“As more districts return to inperson instruction, we are ensuring that schools are not financially penalized for declines in attendance due to COVID-19,” Abbott said in a statement. “Providing a hold harmless for the remainder of the 2020-2021 school year is a
crucial part of our state's commitment to supporting our school systems and teachers and getting more students back in the classroom.”
School districts will have to maintain or increase their on-campus attendance rates or keep them above 80 percent in order to receive the new funding, according to updated TEA guidance.
“The emphasis is on oncampus instruction,” Education Commissioner Mike Morath said in a call with superintendents Thursday. “The best place for kids to be is in a school, learning with their teacher, with the loving educators that we employ. The goal is to support on-campus instruction over the course of the rest of the year.”
School leaders had been pleading with lawmakers and the TEA to sustain their funding after the guarantee expired, worried about the possibility of having to lay off staff or cancel programming next year.
Bexar County school districts were at risk of missing out on an estimated $85 million in state money if the “hold harmless” provision was not extended, area superintendents said in a letter to Morath in December.
The state has required school districts to provide on-campus instruction to any student that wants it since the beginning of the school year. Some area school leaders have encouraged it, except for a brief period after coronavirus cases surged here in January, but even at their highest rates, classroom learners stayed below 80 percent of enrollment, and much lower at other districts.
Abbott announced Tuesday that his statewide mask mandate would end next week, and while many school districts have said they will continue requiring masks on campuses, health experts have predicted that a relaxation of safety protocols elsewhere will cause the number of coronavirus cases to jump in communities across Texas.
The Texas State Teachers Association criticized conditioning much-needed funding on boosting or maintaining on-campus attendance rates, saying districts that see drops in such rates because of local coronavirus outbreaks should not have the money revoked.
North East Independent School District superintendent Sean Maika said the district welcomed the announcement as good news. But he stopped short of a full celebration because of the strings attached.
“We are thankful that the extension has been provided, but it is still too early to really see the full impact,” he said. “Some of the money is still tied to those benchmarks. … So, it's not a guarantee.”
Without the extension, his district could lose about $10 million in funding this year, Maika said. Less than an hour after Morath's announcement, he was somewhat optimistic that NEISD will qualify for it, but maintaining attendence in classrooms if now the big “if,” he said.
Since the district started in-person classes in October, the overall number of families who choose in-person learning has slightly increased, but it fluctuates with the spread of the virus out in the community, and it could drop again with a new surge, Maika said.
“People vacillate in and out based on our (community pandemic) metrics,” he said. “TEA made it very clear that we can maintain (safety protocols). But the cases that end up ‘in our schools' really were not in our schools, they were from outside our schools.”
Morath acknowledged the efforts school districts have made to get students who have not consistently been going to class — remotely or in person — to reengage. In many districts, teachers and administrators have visited students at their homes to encourage them to return to school.
Lawmakers in Austin had considered making such efforts a condition of receiving the funding extension.
The Legislature still has a role to play, because TEA officials said they don't know how “hold harmless” will be funded. They said the money could come from state or federal funds, or both.
Roland Toscano, superintendent at East Central ISD, said the funding extension will allow the district to bolster its efforts this summer to support students who have experienced learning loss in the past year.
“It's definitely going to provide a degree of relief as we plan for finishing out the year, planning for all of the remediation efforts that we're already doing … and continuing to meet the social and emotional needs of so many of our families and continuing to support our staff,” he said.
For the stability it will bring, the governor's announcement was “fantastic news,” said Julia Grizzard, executive director of the Bexar County Education Coalition, which advocates for more than a dozen local school districts.
“This allows our school boards and our school leaders to have a better sense of what their budgets will be for the remainder of the school year as they start to plan recovery efforts moving forward and look ahead to next year's budget,” Grizzard said.