Recent federal administrative changes may cause financial hardship for Texas school districts, with a possible loss of more than $300 million in special education funds per year.
This shift comes at a difficult time for districts, who are dealing with an increase in evaluation requests. Numerous districts may face deficits of over $1 million in the coming school year, with Northside ISD in San Antonio, Dallas ISD, and Cypress-Fairbanks ISD each experiencing shortfalls of over $10 million.
According to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, Houston ISD is also set to lose about $10 million.
Not only are there reservations about the modifications, but also the timing of the announcement.
“Had we known this in August or September, we probably would have made the adjustments at that time. Our budget is fairly tight. There’s not a lot of wiggle room in there for us to pull back on expenditures.” Rene Barajas, deputy superintendent for business and finance at Northside.
The federal government reimburses school districts for staff-provided services to special education kids who have a medical need rather than an educational one through the school Medicaid program. A 2017 audit, however, revealed inconsistencies in how Texas categorized certain medical services, resulting in excessive compensation.
The modifications have sparked controversy on the social media network Reddit, with people weighing in.
“This is what we just voted on why anyone surprised. We just gave all of home owners billions in tax cuts paid for by education.” abbitHots504
Isn’t this the same Texas Republicans that didn’t want to expand Medicare funding while 80% of Texans did? Or that the most recently ‘property tax’ vote was only going to take funding from Schools and see limits to certain programs like this one? Man, who would have seen this one coming? acuet,