The murky funding situation for schools statewide and celebrating graduating seniors were the subjects tackled by Ector County ISD Superintendent Scott Muri during his media call Wednesday.
“Really our primary area of focus right now is funding,” Muri said. “There are a variety of different ways that the legislature on both the House and the Senate side is looking at providing funds for the school districts in our state.”
He added that identifying one particular bill isn’t possible as funding is located in a variety of bills.
“The message really from us is to ensure that our state legislature invests as much as they possibly can in the education of our children. That is by far the greatest investment that we can make. The kids that are attending school today will one day be sitting on this screen and they’ll be leading ECISD. Our future students will be reporters in our media industry; they’ll be writing the stories for our local journalism opportunities. The kids that we have today are the future and we owe it to them to invest in them deeply. That is our message to our legislators is to invest as much as they possibly can and to take advantage of this one-time opportunity in which we have a $32.5 billion surplus this year. … We can certainly do something with that to make a profound impact on the 5.5 million students in the state of Texas and the 33,500 kids in ECISD,” Muri said.
The funding situation in some areas has varied from day to day and sometimes minute to minute.
“I guess a clear example I could use is school safety funding. About two weeks ago, there was a bill that was putting $100 per student investing those dollars in school safety. We were pretty excited about that. Today, that money has disappeared. It is actually now back to about $10 per kid. That’s a concrete example of what can happen in just a couple of weeks,” Muri said.
“We know as an organization that the safety of our children and our staff members is critical and yet we’re not seeing right now the kind of financial investment that (we) need to make in the safety of our students,” he added.
Teacher compensation is another item. On the Senate side, there was a proposal to provide a $2,000 one-time bonus to teachers, but that would go away after one year.
“That is not compensation. That is not a salary increase. It’s a bonus, so that is not the way that we need to treat our teachers,” Muri said.
He asked state lawmakers to pay attention to the governor’s Teacher Vacancy Task Force which made a series of recommendations to the legislature.
“We would implore our state legislature to invest in each of those opportunities, but right now we’re concerned about what kind of investments will be made because we’re seeing a lot of things coming and going, but not seeing any concrete answers to the needs that we have in public education,” Muri said.
Muri said the state has 5.5 million children educated in public schools and economist Ray Perryman says that for every $1 put into students, the return on investment is $56.76.
Muri also wanted to see appropriate raises for staff members to help them keep up with inflation.
“Inflation has affected school districts across the state of Texas. Even here locally we’ve seen an increase just like many of our families in our water bill, our electric bill, our gas bill and our insurance. All of those costs have gone up in the school system and so the state legislature provides funds for us to address those increasing costs,” Muri said.
There also is the cost for transportation to and from school and providing extracurricular activities.
Muri on Wednesday gave a presentation before the Ector County Republican Women about the condition of school buildings.
“We’ve done a lot of work over the past four years. Our board has been very focused in ensuring that we effectively meet the needs of kids, so financially they’ve invested resources in the right area. We have a strategic plan that has really driven a lot of the change and improvement that we’ve made organizationally,” he added.
As for graduation, Muri said they have right at 2,000 students that will be walking the stage this year.
“I encourage members of our community to congratulate and honor the members of the class of 2023. This Friday, we begin the graduation season. OCA and OCTECHS will be the first two schools to graduate this Friday night on the Odessa College campus then next Tuesday New Tech Odessa will be graduating with their class. On Thursday night of next week, Permian High School will take the stage at Ratliff Stadium, and then on Friday night STEM Academy will be graduating on the UTPB campus and then at Ratliff stadium Odessa High School will complete our graduation season,” Muri said.
“We certainly encourage them as they continue beyond high school into the next phase of their life,” he added.
