AISD Is Finding More and More Ways to Cut Expenses in Budget Crunch

AISD has identified another $47 million to cut (art by Zeke Barbaro / Getty Images)

Back in April of 2024, when Austin ISD first realized it was facing a serious budget deficit, Superintendent Matias Segura announced that the administration had found $30 million in cuts, none of which would impact teachers and classrooms. He warned, however, that if it became necessary to cut another $30 million in the following year, the district would probably have to make cuts that would harm student learning – things like laying off teachers and increasing class sizes.

Well, the new year is here and the administration has announced another $26 million in cuts, but no teachers or staff have been laid off. And the district is again saying the cuts will have little effect on classrooms. AISD has even identified another $47 million in planned cuts for the following school year, FY 2025-26, and many of those cuts will be made without laying off teachers or staff.

It’s a remarkable turn of events, Trustee Lynn Boswell said at a board meeting last month. “We’re talking about cutting more than 5% of our budget, on the way to cutting more than 10% of our operating budget, and I think it’s just really important to name that for our community,” Boswell said. “Because these are not small cuts, and it’s not a system that had a lot of fluff to cut. We have already done a really heavy, impressive lift, with a lot more to come.”

AISD Headquarters (photo by John Anderson)

The “more to come” was laid out by interim Chief Financial Officer Katrina Montgomery in a pair of meetings on Dec. 12 and 19. Montgomery presented a group of targets the district expects will yield $20 million of the $47 million in cuts for FY 2025-26. These include:

• Improving the efficiency of the AISD’s master schedule. The master schedule is the district’s overarching planning document which specifies how many teachers and staff to designate to which schools. Increasing its efficiency will save money by keeping classes full, among other things.

• Reforming the way the district enters information on its students for the state’s Public Education Information Management System (known as PEIMS). Texas school districts are required to provide PEIMS “codes” for their students and staff for data analysis by the state. Accurate coding provides more state funding. For example, updating a code to show that a student is disabled or is receiving special education services will trigger more funding from the state.

• Eliminating and rewriting special education contracts. The district has a variety of contracts with third parties to provide special education services. Segura said many of the agreements are obsolete and should be amended or canceled.

• Allowing more employees to use hybrid work schedules to save on office expenses.

• Eliminating the use of portable buildings, which are energy inefficient and costly to maintain.

Segura had eye-opening things to say about some of the strategies at the December meetings. He said the district currently has over 400 unnecessary portable buildings, the newest of which is 26 years old, comprising 700,000-800,000 square feet of space. But he said many of the portables aren’t being used as classrooms and likened them to closets that get filled just because they’re there. He pointed out that they are exposed to the weather on all sides, and thus very inefficient, and frequently require repair, partly because their air conditioning systems are constantly breaking down. He said the portables need to be taken offline now.

Segura also evinced a distinct enthusiasm for renegotiating the many special education contracts the district has entered into in recent years, saying, “I do want to get to a point – it’s a dream state of mine – where we have vendors come in and prove to us that they need to keep the contract.”