Patrick Reportedly Unwilling to Back Any Basic Allotment Increase

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick is reportedly unwilling to increase the basic allotment in negotiations over the House and Senate’s version of a huge public school funding bill, according to the Quorum Report.

The bill in question is House Bill 2, an $8 billion proposal that passed with near-unanimous support from the House after lengthy bipartisan budget negotiations. House Democrats managed to include more funding for the basic allotment, the number that determines how much money each district gets from the state per attending student.

Six years of high inflation during the pandemic without any increase to the basic allotment has left districts across the state struggling to provide services while functionally running with a nearly 20% budget cut due to lost spending power.

The House version of HB 2 included a roughly 6% increase to the basic allotment, but Senate negotiators stripped nearly all of that out in favor of a less than 1% increase — $55 compared to the current $6,160 basic allotment — that repackages an existing source of state funding for schools.

But Patrick, who serves as the president of the Senate, is vehemently opposed to any increase to the basic allotment, despite the private objections of Senate Public Education Committee Chair Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, according to QR.

As the two chambers negotiate on the bill, which at Patrick’s direction have not occurred in public, details have started to emerge on changes that may be proposed in the form of amendments when the full bill heads to the Senate floor.

Sources told QR that there are no changes to the share of the bill dedicated to teacher pay increases, which would be $4.2 billion.

But other areas of public school funding have been cut from earlier Senate proposals. Negotiators last week had agreed to $1.3 billion for special education, but that number has been cut down by about a third to $850 million.

Funding for teacher preparation and certification also has been cut by about half, from $270 million to $135 million, and funding for vocational and technical education resources has been trimmed down to $130 million, a roughly 15% reduction, according to QR.

The Senate proposal also may have excised funding for coastal communities via the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association.

Still, despite those cuts, Creighton and other negotiators reportedly are trying to offer school districts extra money through other avenues, such as a “fixed cost allotment” that school finance experts said would bring in about $100 per student.