Chief Financial Officer Pam Sanchez said current budget assumptions are utilizing current law until any school funding changes made during the 89th Texas legislative session, which concluded June 2, are approved.
What's changing
Some of the $691,000 worth of reductions the district will implement include reducing positions through vacancies or attrition.
"We're protecting positions directly impacting students, so these are other positions that principals and departments have identified we could do without, without adding too much of a workload across the district," Sanchez said.
Some of these reduced positions include elementary fine arts aids.
"The principals are the experts of their campus," trustee Keely Cano said. "... I would just really like us to be very proactive about supporting them in that and really following up on this to see if there's ever an opportunity to bring the aids back, and really keep a close watch that the quality in those classes doesn't decline."
What else?
The district will also eliminate elementary and middle annual substitute teachers—the substitute fill rate is over 90%—but keep two annual substitute teachers at the high school, said Susan Fambrough, assistant superintendent of human resources.
"If we find that [principals] are still having difficulty with staffing classrooms with substitutes, we will revisit that," Fambrough said.
Extra elementary monitors were added during the COVID-19 pandemic, which Fambrough said will be reduced from four to two and can now be supplemented with parents instead.
Trustee Lauren White said the district faced a substitute shortage during the pandemic, and parents and community members "stepped up" to help the district.
"As we're going forward, facing a lot of problems and hard decisions, we are going to have to kind of ask our community to step in and help us in the same way," White said. "So to your point about monitors, I know that once we get the word out that we are facing a budget crisis, this has been a cut to campuses, and we are asking parents to step up and step in, I know that our parents and our community absolutely will."
More details
Per House Bill 2, some of the funding changes that could impact LTISD's budget include:
- An increase to the basic allotment from $6,160 to $6,215
- An increase to the school safety allotment from $10 to $20 per enrolled student, and $15,000 per campus to $33,540 per campus
- An adjusted special education allotment of $1,000 for every special education evaluation conducted for any student, and an eight-tiered funding model based on the intensity of services
- A teacher retention allotment to give teachers with three and four years of experience a $2,500 salary increase, and five or more years a $5,000 increase
Between the 2025-26 and 2026-27 school years, a projected enrollment growth of 1%-2% could add about 200 to 300 students each year.
Another demographic study is scheduled this fall with results in January, Sanchez said.
Looking ahead
Officials are expected to receive final legislative changes in July ahead of adopting the 2025-26 budget and staff compensation plan in August.
