Spring Branch ISD Featured News

School Finance Alert: Top Message in Houston, Austin and Dallas

May 17, 2019 4:13 PM

Imagine managing your personal or home budget for the year ahead on the promise, but with no real assurance, that your annual income would be a certain amount. How would you budget? What would you do if that promised income was too sunny, and suddenly you were thrown into debt?

That uncertain fiscal future was the focus of three separate news conferences sponsored in Houston, Austin and Dallas-Fort Worth on Friday, May 17, including a briefing with local school district officials held in Spring Branch ISD.

The news conferences were held simultaneously as a Texas Legislative Conference Committee moved toward the final version of a new school finance bill. School districts across the state voiced increasing concern at the meetings over a proposed change to the way that the state calculates district funding.

At issue is a not easily understood proposed change to school finance calculations known as current year values which Spring Branch ISD and most other school districts oppose. At the Spring Branch gathering, school district leaders, Board of Trustees members and engaged parents spoke about the adverse impact of moving from a prior year property values to a current year values model for school financing.

The cost to Texas school districts and students is not small – up to $1.8 billion!

Spring Branch ISD Superintendent Scott R. Muri, Ed.D., used the personal yearly budgeting analogy to describe the uncertain new world that current values calculation would impose on school boards and districts under one conference committee proposal.

Muri was joined in Spring Branch by Galveston ISD Superintendent Kelli Moulton, who serves as president of the Texas School Coalition, an alliance of school districts, as well as by SBISD Board Member Minda Caesar, who works on legislative issues with district parents through Spring Branch Speaks, an education advocacy group that has proved effective in the halls of the Texas Legislature in Austin. Also providing comments about the impact of this pending school finance decision from the child and family perspective was Houston ISD parent Heather Golden.

Caesar noted that it is likely that some legislators view the switch to a current year values calculation as a method for the state to “claw back” up to $1.8 billion in new school financing costs.