Georgetown ISD calls for increased funding to meet student, staff needs

In a presentation showing how much funding the district is allotted for special education services that the district is required to provide, the difference between state funding and actual cost of services for the previous school year is about $4.6 million.

Similarly, to meet safety requirements outlined in 2023's House Bill 3, which mandated armed guards at every Texas public and charter school, GISD Chief Financial Officer Jennifer Hanna said the district had to spend $298,827 more than provided by the state to create and staff a school marshal program to the specifications required.

What they're saying

The focus of these requests, Padavil said, is ensuring the district is able to adequately provide for students and employees in a competitive way.

"This is about ensuring that every student is thriving through the experiences they have in Georgetown," Padavil said. "This is about taking care of our people and this is about compensating our people to the level they deserve."

He said a source of concern, as the district works to improve compensation while providing quality services to students, is that students might reconsider becoming educators themselves.

"As a school district, we are going to run out of room to figure out how do we increase compensation," he said. "I get really concerned about young people getting disillusioned with the idea of 'I think I want to go into education' because we just can't keep up with inflation and the cost of living in Central Texas."

Remember this?

In the 2024-25 school year, the district is anticipating paying $17 million back to the state through recapture, a mechanism of redistributing funding from property-rich districts to those that are not.

Funding has been a primary source of concern for Texas school districts in recent years, as the basic allotment, a per-student funding amount that is part of the overall attendance-based funding formula which makes up the bulk of state funding received by school districts, has remained at $6,160 since 2019.