Texas Governor Greg Abbott has been blamed for a Northwest Harris County school district with over 118,000 students being forced to make serious budget cuts due to the lack of state funding.
Back in February, officials from Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District (CFISD), a highly rated public school district in Houston, serving students from pre-kindergarten years to grade 12, anticipated a $73.6 million shortfall in the school’s 2023-24 budget.
Talking at a regular board meeting on February 12, CFISD Chief Financial Officer Karen Smith said that the budget shortfall was due to a combination of high inflation—with rates increasing by 19 percent from September 2019 to August 2023—and lack of adequate funding from the state.
Most of its funding for the fiscal year 2023-24 came from local property taxes, for a total of $619,370,494, according to Community Impact. State funding contributed $423,808,208 to the budget, while federal support amounted to $27,141,180. Even after receiving an estimated $65 million in federal stimulus funds, CFISD still expects to face a budget shortfall, considering an estimated $1.2 billion in expenses.
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Newsweek contacted CFISD, Abbott’s office and the Texas GOP for comment by email on Thursday morning.
Public school funds in Texas are allocated to each district according to a formula considering how many students are enrolled in them, attendance, district size and others.
Recent efforts by Abbott to introduce school vouchers, giving parents money to ditch public schools and invest instead in private schools, have been harshly criticized by Democrats and teachers as attempts to run public schools to the ground.
Educator and activist Bryan Henry, who founded the education non-profit Cypress Families for Public School, has pointed the finger at the Abbott administration for the troubles of CFISD.
“Every single cut being considered was preventable,” Henry wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “The state of Texas, led by Republicans for over 20 years, is failing its school children by choice. We are not in a recession. There has been no loss in tax revenue. There is a historic surplus. There is plenty of money.”
He added: “The Republican Governor and Republican State Senate chose to defund public schools because they didn’t get their voucher bill passed in the State House. They had multiple chances to increase funding, which is justified based on inflation and population growth alone.”
According to Henry, Texas Republicans are “willingly starving school districts of needed funding, directly causing painful budget cuts, because their ploy to divert public tax dollars to private Christian schools failed.”
Texas congresswoman Gina Hinojosa, a Democrat, also blamed CFISD’s funding issues on Abbott. “As a member of the TX House Public Education Committee, I can confirm,” she wrote on X. “Gov. Abbott blocked $ for TX schools as payback for his failed voucher scam,” she added. “Now TX kids are $40B below national average in funding while our $ sits in state coffers.”
Newsweek contacted Henry and Hinojosa for comment by email on Thursday morning.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.