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It’s unlikely Texas schools will know anytime soon if they’ll have extra money to pay for summer programs, tutors or smaller class sizes to help kids recover from the pandemic.
Early drafts of the next state budget have notably omitted about $18 billion in federal funds meant to help students and schools make up lost ground.
Educators are desperate to know how much money they’ll have to support students’ learning loss recovery, but lawmakers said last week that the state may not distribute federal funding for months.
In the last year, the federal government approved three packages of funding for Texas schools totaling about $19 billion. When the state received the first tranche of money last spring, Texas used the new money to support the existing budget, passing along few additional dollars to schools.
Educators fear the same will happen with the second and third federal aid packages — worth $5.5 billion and $12.4 billion respectively — and that districts will again go without any supplemental dollars to recover from the pandemic.
“All parents want to see their children succeed and in order for us to help that happen, we need additional services in order to overcome that learning loss that has occurred,” said Christy Rome, the executive director of the Texas Schools Coalition. “Money is available from the federal government in order to help [our] children succeed, and we want to see it go to our schools.”
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At least 40 states have released some kind of guidance, information about how the money will be distributed or applications to access the new federal funds. Texas is one of a handful that hasn’t taken any steps to allocate the second or third COVID-19 education relief packages.
Lawmakers say Texas’ holdup is that the state must parse through what strings are attached to the money before it accepts them.
Two key provisions attached to the new money in question: one essentially requires states to keep their education funding at or above pre-pandemic levels and the other is to ensure that any state cuts do not disproportionately impact high-need students.
But these rules have caused confusion, some lawmakers say. Texas submitted a waiver to the U.S. Department of Education asking for clarification on what the state would be required to do to use the federal dollars with no clear response yet, Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, said at a March 26 Senate Finance Committee meeting.
The department did not provide a copy of Texas’ waiver request after multiple requests from The Dallas Morning News.
“Everybody thinks that we are going to have $17 billion to play with between now and the end of session,” Nelson said. “We don’t know how much we’re going to have between now and the end of session, if any, and what strings are attached.”
A budget expert explained to House members in a recent budget hearing that the biggest unknown is related to higher education funding.
While the state could easily maintain the same or greater amount of funding for public education because of significant investments made during the last legislative session, financial support for Texas’ public colleges and universities may present a larger challenge.
Initial drafts of the budget show about a $1.2 billion difference between what Texas plans to spend in the next two years and what the state needs to spend to demonstrate it maintained effort from previous years, said Aaron Henricksen, an expert on public education funding with the Legislative Budget Board.
State officials are looking into whether Texas must spend enough to cover that gap in order to draw down the other federal funds and if the funding issues of higher and public education could be separated.
Some believe the $1.2 billion issue to be insignificant in comparison to what federal dollars are at stake.
“The mere thought that they would turn away the $17 [billion] to $18 billion for public education because of not being able to meet the $1.2 [billion]? That math just doesn’t add up,” Rome said.
Ovidia Molina, the president of the Texas State Teachers Association, described the state’s maneuvering around the money as a “slap in the face for Texas school children.”
Molina expressed fears that the state would again use federal dollars to support already budgeted expenses, supplanting Texas’ commitment.
“Congress intended for almost $18 billion in federal funds to be spent for Texas public schools and school kids, to help schools reopen and operate safely during the pandemic and cover some of their millions of dollars in extra, emergency expenses,” Molina said. “Congress did not intend to help the Legislature balance the next state budget by using the federal funds to replace state education dollars or use education stimulus money for other programs.”
The House Appropriations’ subcommittee over public education funding adopted a rider that stipulates the state should not use any of the new federal dollars to reduce the state’s funding for schools and that Education Commissioner Mike Morath should allocate the maximum amount possible.
But because Texas hasn’t actually drawn down federal dollars yet, the document serves more to state intent than anything else, Henrickson noted.
With schools budgeting and forecasting for the next school year, the concern around the federal money pushed Dallas Superintendent Michael Hinojosa to discuss the matter with U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona recently.
“There is good reason for that concern because on some of the early packages from the feds, some of those funds were taken to help the state budget,” Hinojosa said at a March school board meeting. While he’s hopeful that the money will eventually make its way to schools, “We all just need to be vigilant on those dollars.”