Alpine ISD is looking for a way out of a bind that leaves it underfunded and looking for a lifeline.
Alpine is one of the few districts in the state that pays state base, the minimum for teachers. Most districts pay well above that.
Superintendent Michelle Rinehart decided to figure out why.
“What we did is we compared ourselves to other districts that are similar size, similar geography. We’re a 3A district, which means it’s about the number of kids you have enrolled in your district, comparing ourselves to other 3A districts in West Texas. … We received $1,500 less funding per student than the average of all those other districts,” Rinehart said.
“So then similarly sized school districts in our area, and that $1,500 less per kid, that doesn’t seem like much … but when you multiply that out times 1,000 students that’s a $1.4 million funding gap that we receive less than on average all the other districts that are our size in West Texas, and so that confirmed for us,” she added.
The district also conducted an analysis looking at how much Alpine receives in funding per what’s called Weighted Average Daily Attendance. “That’s really a measure of student need, and we’re in the bottom 1.5% in the state. We’re actually the 15th lowest funded school district per student need out of 1,200 school districts in Texas,” Rinehart said.
She added that this confirmed what they had been feeling.
When they compared Alpine to the median districts in the state, they receive $1 million less than they would if they got the middle amount of funding.
“That all makes sense in terms of why we can’t afford to pay people … why we can’t afford to upgrade facilities or provide more funding,” Rinehart said.
Now that they’ve figured that out they are working on getting “really clear on what we call our big three … what are the three things that are causing that and what do we do about them?”
Their big three are discrepancies between the local Central Appraisal District and the state comptroller’s property values.
“What happens there is that our CAD has failed the property value study, which means that our property values locally are appraised significantly lower than what the state comptroller says they are selling at and should be appraised at. What the state then does is they don’t have a way to kind of punish CADs for that so instead they withhold funding from school districts,” Rinehart said.
And yet, she noted, they don’t run the Central Appraisal District and it is not under their jurisdiction.
“It ends up punishing students, schools and communities for a dispute that truly is between the local CAD and the state. This year, we’re losing $313,000 in annual funding for that. Last year, we lost $640,000 so in the past two years this CAD-comptroller dispute, again, that’s outside of our organization, has cost our school district half a million dollars a year to over $1 million for the last two years,” Rinehart said. “That’s huge money on an $11 million budget for us. That’s part of that $1.5 million gap,” she said.
There are other districts like Fort Davis that are experiencing similar issues.
“On the other side of things another thing that’s affecting us is in 2019 the state did a funding formula change. It was called House Bill 3 … and it was designed to increase school funding. This was going to be the fix that finally fixed underfunding of public schools. It was designed to increase school funding by at least 3% in every school district. It did; in about 80-something percent of districts it increased funding. If you look in Region 18, you have districts like Stanton, they’re similar sized to us. Their funding went up by 35%. … Torneo, which is over near El Paso, similar size district. Their funding went up 8%. Presidio, another similar-sized district in our area, went up 8%. Meanwhile, Alpine’s funding dropped 7%,” Rinehart said.
She added that the result was never the intention of the bill.
“That bill was created to try to increase funding to every district, and in aggregate, it did increase school funding. But for about 100 districts, it actually decreased our funding. This is comparing apples to apples. This isn’t looking at well, in 2019 we had this many kids and now we have more or less. These are running our current students, our current enrollment, through both formulas which the state actually does for us and kind of gives us a number. We would have received $750,000 more had we had the previous funding system. How that doubly impacts us is at a time when our funding is actually being cut, these other districts did receive more. That helps create that million-plus swing where other districts, similarly sized, did see a significant increase and we saw a significant decrease,” Rinehart said.
She added that what’s tricky for Alpine is that there are districts who have been negatively impacted by the CAD-comptroller value dispute and those that have been negatively impacted by the House Bill 3 funding change.
“We are one of the districts that’s in that small subsection that’s impacted by both and that’s how we ended up with a $1.5 million funding gap,” Rinehart said.
What they are working on is educating people so they understand how this happens and countering some of the narratives that are out there.
“For example, the governor will talk about, we’ve increased school funding X percent over the last few years and that may be true on average. But that on average is very different from our actuality. We are not represented in that average. Another example of that kind of average in actuality difference that they talk about how the average teacher salary in the state of Texas is $60,000. Sixty-thousand isn’t even a step on our pay scale. Our highest paid teacher who’s been there for 25 years still doesn’t make $60,000 a year, so Alpine is not represented in … those average discussions,” Rinehart said.
“What we’re trying to do is tell the story of hey, the funding system the way that we have this set up, there are districts that are being drastically, and in our mind intentionally underfunded. Are we okay with that as a state? Why do students in Alpine, Texas, not deserve a fully funded education but they do in these other zip codes. I don’t think Texans would feel like that’s fair … but that’s what is actually happening because of these funding formulas,” she said.
Rinehart said she has met with their Sen. Cesar Blanco, Rep. Eddie Morales, staff from Rep. Ken King’s office and others about the situation. They were very responsive and interested in how this happens.
“Those were great conversations. (We) also visited with Representative Ken King staff. He is the only house representative on the House Education Subcommittee who lives west of I-35. He’s in Canadian Texas. He’s nine hours away from us, but he is our representative in Alpine and Canadian is actually also a 3A district. They are the same kind of size as us. But there’s very little representation from West Texas, and so visiting with him and helping him understand the way that these, the nuances of these funding formulas (that) negatively impact certain rural districts and what are we going to do about that,” Rinehart said.
She added that there are some champions for public education for rural school districts, specifically in the House.
“We have not seen that same kind of leadership in the Senate,” she said.
Rinehart said there are other groups advocating for these fixes and there are some different House and Senate bills that are trying to address these changes.
“Many of them are our kind of Band-Aid bills, if you will. For example, there is a bill in both the House and the Senate that would solve the CAD-comptroller value dispute for two years. What it would do is if the local CAD fails, then it requires the state to make up the funding gap for the school; to basically not punish the school, which is what we want,” Rinehart said.
But it’s only temporary. After that, the districts would be back to incurring that financial loss.
Rinehart said Brewster County’s property is valued at next to nothing.
“That’s another reason districts, especially West Texas districts that have minerals are passing their property value studies. Not only that, but then they have been significantly positively impacted by the changes from House Bill 3. For example, I think Rankin’s funding went up 325% because of House Bill 3 … What you end up with is that Rankin and Alpine have similarly sized budgets, about $11 million, and Alpine educates three times as many children,” Rinehart said.
Alpine has 960 students and Rankin has just over 300.
Alpine ISD’s tax rate on the maintenance and operation side is 94.61 cents and 19 cents on the interest and sinking, or debt service, side.
She added that the community has supported the district by passing a bond to update the high school.
“That was a building over 50 years old at the time that even when it had been built it wasn’t constructed in a way that would give it the longevity we needed; electricity didn’t work throughout. There were a number of safety hazards. There were no windows. It was, again, a different time; different financials of what could be afforded at the time. But our community’s literally financial sacrifice to make that happen is so much more substantial than in other communities, because our homeowners had to disproportionately fund that bond,” Rinehart said.
“Our community is incredibly supportive of our school district, both financially but also socially, day-to-day, all of those different things. This rhetoric around anti-public education, or parents versus schools, that’s not the reality at all. That’s really messaging that’s being used to drive somebody else’s political agenda that is not going to improve outcomes for kids in Alpine, Texas,” she said.
“The voucher legislation contains additional gifts of taxpayer funds to private entities without any oversight, and at the same time, those same bills add even more compliance and oversight and regulations to the public schools. The irony of that, the juxtaposition of that, is just fascinating in terms of the conflict of values that represents within the same bill,” she added.
