Your school district's state funding would be based on how many students are enrolled, not how many show up each day.
What it does
Texas would change the main count used to hand out public school money. The state would use a district's average enrollment, meaning the average number of students enrolled during the school year, instead of a daily attendance count built from how many students attended each day. The bill would also set rules for districts that lose students: they would be funded on an enrollment figure no higher than 98 percent of the prior year when enrollment drops two percent or more, unless the drop comes from a military base closing or cutting staff, and the commissioner would adjust all districts funded that way so the total state cost stays within the amount set aside for it. The education commissioner could also adjust for disasters, floods, extreme weather, fuel curtailments, and other calamities, and would have to write rules for counting enrollment, including how much instructional time a program needs to earn full or half credit; the new rules would take effect on September 1, 2027.
What it means for your community
For families, the biggest change is that a district's state money would start from the number of students enrolled rather than the number of daily attendance counts recorded. Students with excused absences would count as attended for funding purposes, and the bill would remove the method that applied a district's attendance rate to hybrid and virtual campuses, so funding would instead be split in proportion when a student spends part of the year in a traditional campus and part in a hybrid or virtual campus. Local school boards would still set budgets and tax rates, but the state money they start with would come from a different count, and districts would follow new state rules for how programs earn full or half enrollment credit. Other local rules would use the new count too, including how single-member school trustee districts are drawn and which school district appoints one member of the board that runs a county water district.
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