The board of trustees approved the district’s FY 2025-25 budget at a June 16 meeting. To avoid facing a budget shortfall, the district made $3.73 million in cuts across campuses and district departments, including athletics and special education.
“The board asked a year ago for what we knew was a tough task: To come to a balanced budget and to make some really hard decisions,” school board President James Scherer said. “The work [district officials] did put us in one of the strongest positions in Central Texas to not only allow us to continue to take care of teachers and staff, but to allow us to keep protecting ... and educating our children.”
The overview
GISD adopted a general operating budget with $170.27 million in revenues and $170.27 million in expenditures. The budget is based on a proposed tax rate of $1.0544 per $100 valuation, which is the same as the FY 2024-25 tax rate.
The district’s largest expense is payroll at $132.72 million, followed by an $18.68 million recapture payment and $9.9 million in expenses for contracted services, Chief Financial Officer Jennifer Hanna said at a June 9 board workshop.
Contracted services decreased by $3.35 million from FY 2024-25. In June, Georgetown ISD began employing its own custodians at elementary campuses after outsourcing its custodial operations over the past three years.
What else?
While the board approved a compensation plan with no pay increases for staff, the district plans to amend its budget in August to account for additional funding under House Bill 2.
The $8.5 billion school funding legislation—signed by Gov. Greg Abbott June 4—allocates $2,500 raises for teachers with three to four years of experience and $5,000 raises for educators with more than five years of experience.
The district has been awaiting guidance from the state on which employees are eligible to receive teacher raises under HB 2. Educators teaching students for more than four hours a day may qualify to receive a raise, Hanna told Community Impact.
GISD could receive an additional $7.48 million in revenue after applying state funding changes made during the 2025 legislative session, around $5 million of which would be required to go toward teacher raises.
The district may use the remaining funding to provide pay increases for other staff members, Hanna said.
How we got here
At recent board workshops, Hanna said the district has “worked very, very hard” to balance its budget. The district adopted a $4.59 million shortfall for FY 2024-25, and was projected to face a shortfall of about $3.72 million for FY 2025-26.
“The sustainability of the district's finances are very important to the board, so that became one of our leading objectives with this tight funding situation in Texas,” Hanna said in an interview with Community Impact. “We really wanted to be sure that we were setting the district up for future financial stability and success.”
The $3.73 million in budget reductions focused mostly on the campus level, comprising 48% of reductions suggested, according to previous Community Impact reporting. A total of 32% of the reductions are districtwide, with 3% concentrated in athletics and 6% in special education programming.
The district looked at eliminating nonclassroom teachers through attrition or reassignments, Hanna said. GISD reduced department budgets by 5% and campus budgets by 10% after already doing so the year prior, she said.
“It's going to require the campuses to do more with less,” Hanna said about the budget cuts. ”A lot of the positions that were cut were support staff positions that support teachers in the classroom and that's going to put more on classroom teachers.”
Visit Community Impact’s previous reporting to view a full list of budget reductions.
