Permanent School Fund: Win-Win

 The biggest hunk of property tax goes to public education. There is a win-win solution, where children are educated and taxpayers are not taxed out of their homes.

The Permanent School Fund is a state fund that receives rents on public lands and sale of minerals (oil & gas from the gulf).
Funding of public education in Texas should --and has, in past years -- come from this fund. When property taxes were added to the school funding, of course magically expenses went up. It's like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow had been found!
Last year, there was $55.6B in the fund. If there are 1,027 districts, that works out to be about $55M per district. A more equitable distribution might be allocating the funds per student.
Here are some unofficial, pissed-off taxpayer calculations:
$55,624,100,000 in the Permanent School Fund.
There are 5,371,586 students in Texas.
That would be $10,355.25 per student.
There are 6,170 students in Lockhart ISD.
That would be $63,891,892.50 for the District.
Currently, there is a budget of $68,541,634.
Difference of $4,649,741.50 shortfall could be made up with better management. My daughter worked in purchasing at LISD and saw books being bought and then warehoused, just because the money had to be spent or lost the next year.
The highest paid administrative office, Superintendent, is $220,000 per year not including benefits like insurance and an expense account.
The Supt. serves 6,170 students and 752 staff, or 6,922 people. That works out to $31.78 per person served.
Consider: The governor of Texas makes $153,750 per year to serve 331,400,000 people. Gov. Abbott gets $.00046 per person served.
The rate of LISD students who graduate at mastery of grade level was 4%-5% (2018-19), according to TEA. This is a 95%-96% failure rate. Perhaps the salary of the Supt and other administrators should be tied to successful performance -- when kids fall short, so does the paycheck.
Gen. Smedley Butler wrote in 1935, "War is a racket." Apparently, Gen. Butler never saw the state of public education today, or he might have had a longer book.

Comments

  1. Granny Good FoodApril 4, 2022 at 5:57 PM

    History of Permanent School Fund:
    https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/permanent-school-fund

    ReplyDelete

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