SAN ANTONIO — The Texas Legislature was ready to spend between $5 billion and $7 billion on public schools during the 2023 legislative session. With inflation on the rise and school districts struggling to stay competitive, the money was sorely needed.
But, now, at the beginning of 2024, the money just sits, unusable, in the state budget. The Texas Legislature never agreed on a bill to use the money thanks to a yearlong fight over school vouchers that ended in a stalemate.
As a result, San Antonio school districts are making cuts or going into deficits while spending to give their teachers and staff members a raise.
"That money is still allocated for education, they just haven't determined how to spend it," NEISD Superintendent Sean Maika said.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had been pushing hard for a school voucher, or education savings account, program since the beginning of the 2023 legislative session. Like-minded Texas Republicans tried several times to tie the voucher program to a school funding bill so lawmakers could only pass funding for school employees if they also passed the voucher program along with it.
The voucher program would have given families between $8,000 and $10,500 for public or private school education, depending on the proposal. Democrats and rural Republicans worried the program was unsustainable and harmful to public education.
A bipartisan collation opposed the program repeatedly in the state house.
In the end, Abbott refused to pass any bill that didn't tie vouchers to school funding, and Texas lawmakers in the House of Representatives refused to approve a voucher program. Both bills died in a stalemate.
Now, NEISD is going into a $34 million dollar deficit in order to increase pay for their employees. Maika said inflation had been hard on staff across the district and they needed the pay increase to retain employees.
"We were looking at not just teacher pay, but custodial pay, bus drivers, others professionals. We wanted to elevate that pay to become as competitive as we could with other districts in our area," he said. "Inflation is hurting everyone. We have to remember that there are a lot of people in an education system."
Maika said the deficit would be paid back over several years.
Northside ISD, a larger district, will be running a $66 million deficit this year in order to support a 3% pay increase across the board. Superintendent John Craft also said they needed to find a way to keep their employees.
"We have to make sure that we are putting high-quality instructors before our students each and every day," Craft said.
That 3% raise was for the current school year, but trouble is already on the horizon for school districts. If Texas takes no further action in 2024, the 2024-2025 school year will also go by without any state funding increase.
Craft said it would make any additional raises extremely difficult.
"We can't just arbitrarily raise taxes, we can't pass on the price of services. It's going to be really challenging as a result of the inability of the legislature to be able to pass any meaningful legislation for teacher compensation," Craft said.
Craft also told KENS 5 that NISD would need to eventually cut that $66 million from other places in the budget by the end of the year, or they would need to take money out of savings. He said NISD and other school districts will be talking about other options to save money. Those options could include consolidating schools, a hiring freeze or a compensation freeze.
Abbott could call another legislative session to focus on school funding specifically, but both superintendents believed it was unlikely. Abbott has already said he was willing to pass vouchers "the hard way" by supporting pro-voucher candidates in the 2024 state elections and replacing Republicans that opposed vouchers.
KENS 5 reached out to Abbott's office Tuesday to ask if there was a possibility of a special session, but we never received a response.
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