The Texas State Senate recently proposed a $218 billion two year budget that would shift approximately $2 billion in public education costs from the state to local taxpayers. With Frisco ISD in the midst of finalizing its 2017-2018 budget, the financial relationship between the state and Frisco could be changing.   

“In Texas, school funding is based on a formula made up of a local share and a state share,” Frisco ISD Chief Financial Officer Kimberly Pickens said via email. “You can think of it like a bucket – the State tells us how big our bucket is going to be, we have to fill as much of it as we can with local property taxes, and then the State will fill up the rest.”

For the Texas school districts, local property taxes currently exceed state contributions to public school funding, meaning state funding will go elsewhere.

“If you put all the districts in the state together, we collectively make more in property taxes than the State needs us to,” Pickens said via email. “Ideally, the State would put in the same amount of their own money as they did last year and just let our buckets get bigger, but that’s unfortunately not what happens. The buckets will get bigger, but they won’t grow proportionally to the amount of money that’s raised. Instead, the State will shift their own dollars to other things and let local property tax dollars make up more of a percentage of public education funding.”

The senate proposal increases public school funding by $4.6 billion, including a $2.6 billion provision to cover student enrollment growth, therefore, Frisco ISD is preparing for local tax amounts to continue to increase.

“For Frisco this mean that there is a chance we’ll get more money per student than we do now if the House and Senate can agree on a funding bill, which is good news,” Pickens said via email. “It also means, though, that our local share of the formula is going to get bigger and the state share is going to get smaller, just like it has been doing for years.”

The 2017 state legislative session ends May 29, which is after the Frisco ISD 2017-18 budget is finalized on May 8 but before the Frisco ISD Board of Trustees votes on the budget June 19.

“The Board will have the next 2 months to think through those recommendations before adopting the final budget in June,” Pickens said via email. “We’re closely monitoring what’s going on at the State level, but we won’t build anything into our budget until something is agreed on and signed into law. The recommendation right now is that any additional funding that’s provided from the legislature will be prioritized for staff salaries, benefits, and reducing class sizes. We don’t feel like it would be wise to count on receiving additional revenue and plan how we’re going to spend it until it’s a done deal. So for now, we’re building the budget based on the funding formula that’s in place for this year.”