Erich Morris, assistant superintendent of operations for MISD, spoke with Community Impact following the election.
What do you think about the VATRE results?
[I’m] pleased with the voter turnout. Any time that you can have that sort of voter representation in an election, I think that's a good thing. I don't think it's a surprise, given it was a presidential election year, in terms of the voter turnout. The results of the VATRE were not what we were hoping for, but we appreciate everyone who casted a vote. We will respect the end product, if you will, and move on with our day-to-day business.
What does the VATRE failing mean for the district?
What it means is we're in the same position that we were in the day before the election, ... and what I mean is that we're going to continue to have school, we're going to continue to do the things that we do in terms of focusing our decisions on what best benefits our students and staff.
We went into the VATRE with a balanced budget,, and so with the VATRE's exit, we continue with a balanced budget moving forward into next year. We're going to continue on with business as usual.
What it didn't do for us, given the results, was provide us with the additional funds that we would have received, in particular from the state of Texas, had the end product of the election been different. What that means is that, unfortunately, we're not able to move forward with the plan that we had in place [of] the alternate budget, the alternate compensation plan, which would have benefitted our teachers, our classroom aides, our custodians, our maintenance workers, our food service employees and our school resource officers, our constables in terms of raising their pay—all of those employees' pay to help those employees and their families keep up with inflation and to also help respond to the absence of any additional state funding which has sort of put us in this position given that the state has not increased the per-student revenue since 2019 in spite of the inflation and challenging times that we're in.
So what that means is we're unable to do the things that we would have done. ... It's disappointing, I'll be honest with you. It's disappointing for our teachers, for our instructional aides, our constables, our custodians, our maintenance workers. It's disappointing that we were unable to produce the additional revenue that would have benefitted our employees. That's disappointing.
However, though, we'll carry on. We're still in a good position. We're not going to hang our heads and pout. We're in a good position. We respect the outcome of the election, and we know that our community supports our teachers and our school district. We also know that it's challenging to address anything that results in a tax increase, and we completely understand that. We felt at the time, and continue to feel like it was the right thing to do for our employees to go to bat for them, since the state has failed to do so, and again, [we're] disappointed in the outcome, but we will respect it. And we're going to carry on with life as usual—balanced budget and focusing decisions on the best interests of our kids.
How does the VATRE failing affect MISD's legislative priorities?
I don't think anything changes in our priorities. We have a way of doing business that has been a model of consistency for many years and nothing is going to change that. We go through our budget process each and every year and try to find [and] weed out inefficiencies, and our first goal is to take care of our teachers—the ones that are in the classroom taking care of our students. And then the rest of our staff too, to help remain competitive with salaries and also help them from a family perspective. And none of that changes.
We'll go through our normal budget process like we do each and every year and ... we will hold out some hope, as grim as it may be based on [the] recent past. Our Legislature meets again this January, and they will wrap up their session, as they always do towards the end of May. The decisions that are the outcome of decisions made and bills passed during that session will affect all public schools in terms of funding for the following two years. ... We hope that there's some funding that results from legislative action that will, at very minimum, allow us to increase pay for our teachers. So there is that hope. That hope remains. ... We'll anxiously watch and listen to what's going on in Austin this spring.
But beyond that, we're starting to build budgets and staffing models and things of that nature based on current law, because we can't assume anything as it relates to additional funding from the state. But in terms of anything changing, ... nothing changes. We go about our business, and we pass balanced budgets, and we do everything we can to get money in the hands of our employees.
