Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows has agreed to the Senate’s changes to an $8 billion school funding bill, including a revision to almost totally eliminate the House’s increase to the basic allotment, the Houston Chronicle reported.
Burrows, a Republican from Lubbock, formally endorsed the changes on Wednesday along with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who acts as the president of the Senate, and Gov. Greg Abbott.
Though the Senate has not yet made available copies of its substitute version of House Bill 2 — a political tactic from Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick that breaks from a tradition of discussing those changes in open meetings, according to the Quorum Report — copies of the summary of changes posted online sketch its contours.
Big changes
The substitute is a compromise between the two chambers’s visions for school funding.
HB 2 as approved by the House had a more expansive scope that included funding for full-day preschool and bilingual education programs and a roughly 6% increase to the basic allotment, the per-student amount that determines how much money districts get from the state each year.
Months before the House passed those changes in a single bill, the Senate had approved several bipartisan measures that would have given schools less money overall and that would have prescribed exactly how districts could spend that money.
The Senate’s substitute version maintains the roughly $8 billion that the House had proposed while maintaining its own stricter limits on how that money can be spent. Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, who chairs the Senate Public Education Committee and led the chamber’s negotiations on HB 2, has argued that that approach ensures that schools are not misspending money.
Public school advocates have criticized that attitude. Texas lawmakers haven’t increased the basic allotment since 2019, and after years of high pandemic-era inflation, school districts increasingly have been struggling with wrenching budget deficits that have led to school closures and a teacher exodus.
Instead, they’ve advocated for an increase to the basic allotment more than anything else, which gives districts the most flexibility to take care of their own individual needs, from building renovation to buying new books or school buses to increasing salaries for support staff.
At least one superintendent told the Chronicle that even if the bill passes, his district, Waelder ISD, still will be running a deficit because it wouldn’t have any extra discretionary funding.
In order to return to the spending power they had in 2019, the state would need to increase the basic allotment by about 20%, or roughly $1,200.
Democrats in the House managed to negotiate a roughly 6% increase to the basic allotment in the passed version of HB 2. The Senate gutted that increase to less than 1%, just $55.
Teacher pay
More than half of the bill’s price tag, $4.2 billion, would go to increasing pay and benefits for public school teachers explicitly modeled on Senate Bill 26, which the Senate unanimously approved in late February.
Those changes would include expansions to the state’s performance bonus program for top-performing teachers and flat salary bonuses to teachers based on experience and district size.
Increasing teacher pay had been one of Abbott’s top priorities this session.
The superintendent of Waelder Independent School District told the Chronicle that his district still would be running a deficit if the bill passes because of the Senate’s proposed restrictions on how the money could be spent.
For smaller districts of 5,000 or fewer students, teachers would make an extra $5,000 per year once they have taught in Texas for more than three years, and an extra $5,000 on top of that each year once they’ve taught for more than five years here.
In larger school districts, that raise would be smaller: $2,500 per year for teachers with more than three years of experience up to $5,500 total per year for teachers with more than five years.
Other changes
The Senate revision also would increase special education funding by $1.3 billion, which would plug most of the $1.7 billion funding shortfall that the system currently faces, and set aside $677 million for early literacy and numeracy programs and screeners for school districts.
Another $270 million would go toward helping teachers get certification. As teachers leave the Lone Star State to work elsewhere, many school districts have hired unlicensed teachers to help fill staffing shortages and are asking the Legislature to help create a path for them to get certified.
And $153 million would be spent to expand career and technical education offerings for Texas students, including facilities for trade education such as plumbing and welding.
Further information
The Senate Public Education Committee heard the committee substitute this morning. It went into recess when the full Senate reconvened at 11 a.m. but will return to its deliberations once the full body concludes its business.
