Coppell ISD officials adjusted the fiscal year 2024-25 budget shortfall from $7.5 million to $8.7 million following the failure to pass the voter-approval tax rate election, VATRE, in early November.
“We have been dealing with budget challenges for several years,” Superintendent Brad Hunt said. “The VATRE was something that we were hopeful for, but it was never a guarantee. It not passing has created more opportunities for us to look closely at what we are doing with our budget.”
The details
The VATRE would have generated $2.4 million in revenue for the district had it passed. This loss of anticipated revenue increased the budget deficit to $9.9 million, but officials are operating with a lower shortfall with the expectation of expense savings or additional revenue streams, Chief Financial Officer Diana Sircar said at the Nov. 18 board meeting.
Sircar said the district will continue to pursue cost savings measures and funding avenues such as selling old technology devices, for which the district has received $900,000 in 2024.
With the failure of the VATRE, the fiscal year 2024-25 maintenance and operations tax rate is $0.7552, a decrease from the FY 2023-24 total and M&O rates. However, residents could still see higher tax bills this year due to around 11% increase in average single-home property values, according to district documents. The average single-family residence’s taxable value within district boundaries rose from $459,210 in FY 2023-24 to $513,603 in FY 2024-25.
While optimistic, if the average daily attendance declines throughout the year as expected and no other revenue streams are secured, district officials will need to amend the budget shortfall and likely realize larger deficit budgets, Sircar said.
Current projections, based on continued stagnant state funding, indicate that CISD will see deficit budgets surge to $18 million by FY 2027-28. These figures also include savings from the recently closed Pinkerton Elementary and consolidated school programs, Sircar said.
The context
It is expected that elementary enrollment in CISD will decline by 550-660 students in the next three to four years, according to district documents, which would lead to a state funding loss of around $4.4 million. As students move up in grade levels, the secondary grades will start to see the decline in enrollment. The 2024-25 budget planned for 13,390 total enrollment and 12,719 average daily attendance rating.
Actual enrollment for the 2024-25 school year is just over 13,200, according to district data. Average daily attendance dropped from 12,725 in 2023-24 to 12,667 this year, Sircar said. However, the district still maintained a 97% attendance rating for the first 12 weeks of school this year.
“The attendance rate through the first [12 weeks] is excellent and we have had a lot of work being done to increase attendance, but it also tends to be that the first [12 weeks] are the highest attendance rates we have each school year,” Sircar said.
Overall enrollment and average daily attendance both contribute to a district’s state funding, which is calculated through a per student allotment based on attendance. This allotment, around $6,160 per student, has not changed since 2019 despite over 20% inflation since that time and underfunded state mandates that have contributed to CISD adopted shortfalls, according to previous Community Impact reporting.
The state would need to increase the allotment by at least $1,300 for districts’ to have the same buying power they did in 2019, according to Raise Your Hand Texas, an education advocacy organization. If the state increased the allotment by $500 it would cost around $7.4 billion, Sircar said.
“We can't count on that,” she said.
Also of note
Other budget impacts include the termination of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, ESSER, funds, a federal grant program aimed to mitigate pandemic learning loss from Sept. 2021 to Aug. 2024, according to the Texas Education Agency.
Since that time CISD has used $6.6 million of these funds to hire additional staff, new instructional materials, tutors, staff retention stipends and various summer programs, said Robyn Webb, CISD’s director of Federal and State Programs. According to district data, CISD student academic performance has recovered to pre-pandemic levels.
“Overall, the programs implemented with the ESSER funds allowed Coppell ISD to address learning loss experienced by students,” Webb said.
The Emergent Bilingual summer program, which was expanded through ESSER, focuses on literacy and speaking skills through hands-on learning and was funded with ESSER funds from 2021 to 2023, Webb said. During those years the district also used ESSER grants to fund a flex nurse program, which provided an alternate nurse during school nurse absences, ensuring no gap in services.
The flex nurse program will be continued through the use of local grant funds and the emergent bilingual summer program, which is state mandated, will be continued through the use of federal grant funds other than ESSER, officials said.
Looking ahead
While there will likely be state funds available for public education following the 89th Legislative session set to begin in January, Sircar said CISD anticipates these funds to be targeted for specific initiatives like reading and math programs for early grade levels and might not help alleviate budget shortfalls.
“What we are hearing is they want to give us more money, but they want to tell us where to spend it,” she said.
CISD plans to hold an event Jan. 14 to rally community members’ support in the district’s efforts to advocate for public school funding this session, Hunt said.
