The ESSER funds dealt out by the federal government during the pandemic to prop up public schools are about to be gone leaving Houston ISD and other school districts with a big hole to fill.
Especially if, as in HISD, a lot of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief money was used to pay salaries rather than the recommended use of the funds which included needed facilities repairs, aiding students’ access to education during the pandemic and supporting the mental health of students.
The people are still with the district; the funding ends as of September 2024. And the district continues to experience enrollment declines which means less money from the state based on average daily attendance.
That’s a problem, HISD Superintendent Mike Miles said at a press conference Tuesday as he outlined the cuts he proposes so that HISD can produce a budget for the 2024-25 school year that leaves a fund balance of at least $800 million — down from his earlier statements that it would be at least $850 million and perhaps $870 million.
“Board members and I have talked and we’re getting feedback from principals. We want to make sure that they feel that cuts to their budgets get won’t be so deep that they can’t run effective schools. And that’s the right attitude to have for a principal,” Miles said.
“So it won’t be that we’re getting rid of all the ESSER funded positions. We’ll still provide curriculum supports. In order to do that we’re going to have to spend more money to make sure that we are bringing you a balanced budget but also one that’s fiscally responsible. In order to do that, we will have to spend a bit more money.
Under the previous administration, the projected fund balance was estimated to drop to $548 million for the next year. ” That’s the size of the challenge. that we’ve got to do,” Miles said.
A draft of the budget, which the administration has been working on since January, will be presented to the state-appointed Board of Managers in May whose members will have to vote on and approve a final version by June to meet state deadlines.
“We’re assuming flat state allocation. We’re assuming we’re not going to get any money in this year We are going to fund the NES model at 130 schools,” Miles said. To counter this, he said there will be a decrease in outside services contracts and central office staff and NES staffs will be “right-sized.”
Tuesday afternoon, the principals in non-New Education System schools got their budget allocation for the 2024-25 school year. principals at what will be 130 NES schools next school year have been relieved of any budget calculation duties; that’s being done for them by the HISD Central Office.
While saying that he intends to keep the cuts away from students and the classrooms and continue to invest in teacher salaries, a key piece of Miles’s plan is his proposal to end the hold harmless status of enrollment and attendance at schools that was in place over the last three years due to the pandemic with its sharp decline in student attendance.
Under hold harmless, schools that lost any number of students were still funded by the district as if those students were still there. Speaking in admittedly wide ballpark figures, Miles estimated that has cost the district $50 million a year over each of the last three years.
Like other districts, HISD gets money from the state based on enrollment and average daily attendance — which means the kids have to be there. “Last three years we’ve been funding the schools … if they lost 100 kids they still got money for those 100 kids that are no longer here.
“We’re at a point that we can’t keep doing that. We’ve got to stop that.”
He proposes to temper this change in policy by capping the loss at 12 percent of budget on each school, meaning, at least initially, that a school with a sizable decrease in its student body won’t see its budget plummet by quite as much in one year.
“We’re trying to ease in.” One school had so many decreases that it would have lost 43 percent of their budget. “But they’re not going to lose 43 percent. They’re going to lose 12,” he said.
In the last year, he said, this amounted to 25 schools who would be losing more than 12 percent of their budget if that cap isn’t approved. Still, as he readily conceded, a 12 percent budget cut is much harder on a small school with a budget of $2 million than a larger school starting with a budget of $10 million.
“Right-sizing” will be applied to NES schools, he said. These are cases where for instance, six teachers were put in place even though the size of the student body called for five. Projections were too high.
Extras that will remain the same include small school subsidy, high school subsidy and magnet school subsidies. However, Miles did not promise this would continue in the future. He once again pledged not to close any small schools — but again, only for this coming school year.
“We could save a lot of money by closing small schools,” he said, but added that at first he wants to see what happens if the district does everything it can to improve those schools first. “Then we can say we’ve done right by the community.”
Margaret Downing
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