Elected leaders from Travis County and the city of Austin pledged at a joint meeting with Austin ISD late last month to help the school district confront its recurrent budgetary shortfalls. That inevitably means talking about recapture, the Texas “Robin Hood” law that requires property-wealthy districts to send their “excess” tax revenues to the state, in theory to redistribute to the poorest school districts. In practice, “so much of it is not going into education,” said AISD Trustee Lynn Boswell. “If we took the $1.4 billion” in statewide recapture payments in 2021-22 “and put it all back into education, it would increase per-student funding by roughly $250 per kid, which isn’t enough to solve our education crisis, but it matters.”
Minimum per-student funding is guaranteed by the state; each school district currently receives $6,160 per student. As Texas School Coalition Executive Director Christy Rome explained, those dollars are being stretched further in districts like AISD due to rising property values and declining enrollment, both of which increase those districts’ share of the recapture total. Although more than 140 urban and rural districts across the state pay into recapture, Austin pays by far the most: $762 million in fiscal year 2022, or about 54% of the statewide total. And, as County Commissioner Brigid Shea explained, help for Austin and Travis County is hard to come by in the Republican-controlled Legislature.
Others on the joint committee stressed that while Austin is the site of a lot of expensive property, 52% of students in AISD are economically disadvantaged. In a city like Austin, Rome said, those students “have less opportunities and less access to resources that might help to bolster their education. A family in poverty is not taking a trip to Boston to study the Freedom Trail before they study the American Revolution in history … Just because you have to pay high property taxes doesn’t mean you have a lot of personal wealth.”
Under the current recapture formula, Austin’s share will continue to rise along with property values in Central Texas, where the median home sales price now hovers around $500,000. Next year, AISD expects to transfer $798 million to the state’s coffers, and may see annual recapture top $1 billion by the 2025-26 school year. While the state’s districts have collectively lobbied the Legislature to increase the state’s per-student funding so that the recapture burden can be lessened, local leaders may be willing to go further. Council Member Alison Alter suggested exploring legal challenges to the 30-year-old recapture regime, first instituted in 1993 after the Texas Supreme Court ruled the state’s school funding system unconstitutional in 1989.
This article appears in April 8 • 2022.