Plano ISD looking at potential $10.6 M shortfall

One year after the state legislature severely slashed the public education budget, Plano ISD is still feeling the repercussions.

At Tuesday night's school board meeting, district administrators revealed that PISD is looking at an estimated $10.6 million state funding shortfall for the 2012-2013 school year.

"This is the second year of the biennium and hopefully this is not the first time you have heard that we will be losing additional state revenue in the 2012-2013 year," Linda Madden, the district's executive director of finance, told the school board. "We have known this and stated a very similar amount since the legislation was known this past summer."

While $10.6 million is a substantial deficit, the district had to cut $24 million from the current year's budget to deal with the shortfall in the first year of the biennium. To make those cuts, the district slashed departmental budgets and laid off more than 300 employees.

Neither Madden, nor interim Superintendent Richard Matkin, went into detail about how the district would attempt to deal with the shortfall. However, in December Matkin told the board he felt the district could absorb the shortfall using its fund balance and employee attrition.

State funding is determined in part by a district's weighted average daily attendance (WADA). The district's current WADA is 64,846 students, but the funding formula used by the state for this school year is paying the district for only 60,887 students. For the upcoming school year, the district will get about 75 percent of the lost WADA back and will be paid based on a WADA of 63,806 students.

Matkin said the decrease in WADA for the current school year was done at the state level in an attempt at equality.

"That is the only way they could effectively reduce all schools by an equal percentage amount," he said. "Everyone was funded based on WADA so the only way they can apply a consistent 6 percent loss across the state is to adjust everybody's WADA number by the same amount.

Matkin said the state funding formula is changing for the upcoming school year, with varying results from district to district.

"When they go to the next year they are no longer interested in everyone losing the same amount of money," said Matkin, who mentioned several times that the inequality and inefficiency in funding is one of the reasons the district is part of a lawsuit against the state. "Some of the school districts who are not as wealthy, some of their revenue streams will be going up ... We are going to see a lesser number, but a lot of area school districts are going to get more money than they did this year."

The news was not all negative at the meeting, as the district's "Robin Hood" recapture payment -- the money the district sends to the state so it can be redistributed to poorer school districts -- will decrease from $38 million this year to $25.6 million next year. This savings of $12.4 million is a large reason the budget shortfall decreased as much as it did.

Madden also briefly touched on property values, which she said remained flat from last year to this year. The district is estimated to have about $31 billion in taxable value, for an estimated revenue of $323 million.

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