The tiny Throckmorton school district is 250 miles away from the Texas Capitol, yet it briefly took center stage during a recent Senate debate.
Roughly 150 students enroll in Throckmorton schools. Those kids learn from about 20 teachers, all on one campus.
For a district that small, there’s not a lot of wiggle room in the budget. If even a few students left, the school would feel a financial impact. That’s because Texas schools are largely funded based on how many students attend.
As lawmakers debate legislation to create education savings accounts – which would allow families to access public funds to pay for private school tuition – places like Throckmorton could stand to lose out. Even if one student per-grade left the district using an education savings account, “that literally would be an effect to that school,” Sen. Drew Springer, R-Muenster, said during the Senate debate.
Springer said he was worried about the potential impact on small, rural districts – though he voted in support of the legislation, along with other Republicans in the upper chamber.
Education savings accounts are a priority of Gov. Greg Abbott, who has threatened to call lawmakers back to Austin yet again if they don’t get a bill passed during the final days of the third special session. The governor on Tuesday said he reached an agreement on education savings accounts, but it’s far from a done deal. The House has historically batted down voucherlike proposals.
While it’s easy to visualize the impact of students leaving a small, rural school district like Throckmorton, some urban and suburban school districts are also seeing enrollment declines. The trend can lead to budget shortfalls, high school football realignment and difficult conversations – including about staff reductions and whether to shutter campuses.
Fort Worth ISD trustees recently reviewed sobering enrollment information. The district has lost roughly one in five students since 2016, according to the Fort Worth Report. Trustees voted to study ways the shrinking student body could impact operations – a signal they may move to close schools.
Fort Worth’s losses stem from a proliferation of charter schools, an uptick in homeschooling and fewer babies born in the area, said Mike Naughton, director of facilities planning and operations.
“A decline in the number of children born five years ago means there are fewer kindergarteners in classrooms today,” he said. “Which means there are fewer first graders next year, and so on.”
As the district discusses long-range planning, the Legislature’s decisions on voucherlike programs could play a role in what comes next.
“From a numbers perspective, strictly, I think it’s difficult to see how subsidizing private school enrollment would do anything but diminish enrollment in the community’s public schools,” Naughton said.
Plano ISD recently launched a committee to probe similar questions as Fort Worth. In Irving, trustees recently decided to explore boundary changes and the possibility of closing campuses.
Dallas ISD has also lost thousands of students in recent years. The city is close to a high concentration of private schools when compared to other areas of the state.
“There is the concern that with vouchers, we will see student loss and that student loss is going to cost more for schools than they’ll save from not having to educate those kids,” said Chandra Villanueva, policy director with Every Texan, a pro-public education group. “Schools have a lot of fixed costs, like all of the utilities.”
Across Texas, more than 5.5 million students attended public schools last year. Enrollment rose 1.7% over the previous year and surpassed pre-pandemic figures – a sign of normalcy after COVID. After the COVID-19 crisis, statewide enrollment decreased for the first time since the state education agency began collecting this data.
While enrollment in traditional public schools grew, it didn’t keep pace with growth in the charter school sector. Those schools saw their enrollment balloon by roughly 7% last year.
Homeschooling is also a growing trend, though it’s hard to quantify the exact number of homeschooling families in the state. The Texas Home School Coalition said roughly 30,000 middle and high school students left public schools for homeschooling each year since the pandemic. The group estimates roughly half-a-million students statewide are homeschooled.
“We anticipate the numbers to continue to rise,” coalition policy director Anita Scott said. “Post-COVID, parents are very much attracted to the idea of being the primary influencer of directing and controlling their children’s education. They want to be on the frontline of what their children learn.”
Losing money
Texas schools are funded through a byzantine system of formulas. The fundamental building block is the “basic allotment” – the amount of money schools receive from the state, based on each child that attends. Schools get additional money based on various characteristics, such as if a child receives special education services or is learning English.
If a student leaves, the money goes, too.
Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, chair of the Senate education committee, has emphasized the $500 million needed to fund his education savings account proposal this biennium would come from general revenue – not the pot of money set aside for public schools.
Still, the fiscal note for his bill acknowledges that public school funding “may decrease as a result of the bill due to students leaving public schools to participate in the program.”
How much they could stand to lose depends on many factors. Some school districts are in private school deserts and likely wouldn’t see many families tap into an education savings account program. The number of families that would be eligible for an ESA is one of many details yet to be worked out in the Legislature.
Every Texan ran an analysis of how much schools would lose if between 1%, 3% and 5% of their students left with an ESA program.
To calculate what could be lost, the group multiplied the average statewide funding per-student – roughly $8,350 in traditional public schools – by varying usage rates.
If 1% of Dallas ISD students used an ESA, for example, the district could lose nearly $12 million. If 3% of Fort Worth ISD students left, that could be a more than $18 million loss. And if 5% of Plano ISD students did so, it would leave a $20 million hole.
Villanueva said, in reality, some districts would lose more and some would lose less.
The goal, she said, was to “give a ballpark at what was at stake.”
The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.
The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Garrett and Cecilia Boone, The Meadows Foundation, The Murrell Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University, Sydney Smith Hicks and the University of Texas at Dallas. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.
