Facing a financial cliff in two years, Fort Davis ISD Superintendent Graydon Hicks is pleading for help from residents and legislators.
Fort Davis has 180 students in prekindergarten through 12th grade and serves a 1,500-square-mile area. Homeowners, ranchers and mom-and-pop businesses are the only tax base, but it is considered property rich.
“School finance is very complicated,” Hicks said. “Basically to make it simple, the state uses a ratio. They take your property values and divide that by your weighted average daily attendance and that gives you a number. If that number is above a certain threshold, you’re considered property rich.”
The problem, he said, is that that number is tied to the basic allotment, which is the bottom line amount of money that the state says you should be getting to educate one child all year long.
With House Bill 3, it eventually got to $6,160 per child, per average daily attendance, for a year. Hicks said it has never been tied to inflation, so there is no automatic adjustment. If you go above that level, you’re considered property rich, Hicks said.
“It has to take legislative action to change the basic allotment, so the basic allotment has never been current, so to speak,” Hicks said.
Fort Davis ISD’s budgeted annual expenditures have hovered around the $3 million mark since at least 2015, Hicks said. This year, it is $3.27 million. Last year, it was $3.18 million.
But the state share has dropped dramatically. Efforts to reach state Rep. Eddie Morales, D-Eagle Pass, and Sen. Cesar Blanco, D-El Paso, were unsuccessful.
Fort Davis ISD’s property values have risen 45 percent since 2012 and the state share has dropped 95 percent in that same period, Hicks said.
“I’ve got a $660,000 deficit on a $3.2 million budget and I’m using second-hand vehicles. I’ve got a dirt track around the football field — dirt and rocks that the kids run on. I have no cafeteria, no teacherages (teacher housing), a science lab built in 1973 — the same as it was then and I’m paying the state minimum salary schedule. Until the state includes all the revenue in these calculations and comes up with a different threshold, I’ll be done,” Hicks said.
Teachers are paid the state minimum salary of $33,600 a year with staff getting an extra $1,000 per year when they reach five years with the district. Asked how long the district can last, Hicks said he will run out of fund balance, the reserves required by the state, in the summer of 2024.
He said he has asked the Texas Education Agency about the fate of his district and whether it could be consolidated with another one, but no one knows.
Hicks can look to consolidate with someone on his own. Marfa is the closest town 20 miles away, but it is in Presidio County. However, he has to look in Jeff Davis County first.
The closest town in that case is Valentine, which is 40 miles away and has 35 students.
“I’m adding the entire county, which is the fifth largest county in Texas, to the tax base. It would not mitigate the expenses other than the superintendent’s office because there would be no need for two superintendents. But you’d have to have a campus in Valentine because then you’re going to pick up the extra cost for busing, which is not small,” Hicks said.
The state share for Fort Davis ISD was $3.6 million in 2008.
“… This coming year for ’22-23, I’m only going to get $55,000, so the state share for my district has dropped by 95 percent. That’s only since 2012,” Hicks said.
The district’s total tax rate is $0.9735 per $100 valuation for 2022 as they are being “forced” by the state to compress it.
The total rate was $1.17 per $100 valuation in 2018; $1.06 in 2019; $1.035 per $100 valuation in 2020; and the same in 2021.
Fort Davis has been classified as a property rich Chapter 49 district for the last five years, subject to recapture payments back to the state. Hicks has a staff of 43 including custodians, aides, teachers, administrators and secretaries.
In an article Hicks wrote and sent to the OA, he details what can be done. In the short run, not much can help him.
“Contacting our legislators is critical. Letting them know that this situation is unacceptable. Hold them accountable with your votes. They could, if they so chose, amend the public school funding methods with these few things:
- Include bond revenues (I&S) in calculations to determine whether a district is “rich” or “poor.”
- Increase the Basic Allotment, but detach this allotment from the state’s minimum salary schedule.
- Increase the “weights” for special populations.
- Remove the ability of the state comptroller’s office to override local county appraisal district calculations of property values, except in very limited circumstances.
- Put automatic inflationary adjustments into the calculations so that legislative action is not required to adjust the funding system.
- Eliminate the current authority of the state to impose penalties and restrictions on districts that struggle with student performance on state assessments, due to very low enrollments.
“It is imperative that taxpayers and citizens become school funding-informed, be vocal with our state government and insist on the same accountability in Austin as Austin asserts on us locally …,” Hicks wrote.
Hicks said Texas is a non-disclosure state, so you don’t have to reveal what you paid for the property.
For example, if 100 homes are sold, maybe 10 reveal what they paid.
“… The state will take 10 pieces of property transactions and they’ll say if we average these 10 houses sold for 50 more percent than they were listed at on the appraisal roll, therefore all 500 houses in the district have to have their property values raised by 50 percent,” Hicks said.
In a city, where you have a lot of track homes, that may make sense because you have more homes that are similar, he said.
“But in rural West Texas, there is not a single house that is like another house; not one. So the comps that are used are very difficult, but the bottom line is the state overrides the values … If the county appraisal district is not within 10 percent of what the state says it should be based on in their little bitty sample, then the state values take precedence,” Hicks said.
The district’s 2021 property values were $203 million.
“The state came back and said nope, you have $233 million of property value. So if you take $33 million and you divide that among 180 kids, then it’s a big jump. That’s what pushes me up into the Chapter 49 status,” he said.
For 2022, the Jeff Davis County Appraisal District determined the values to be $233 million.
“… The state is now indicating and planning the school finance template. They’re saying my values are going to be $253 million, so they just keep bumping it up and every time they bump it up, they get to lower what the state allows us to keep. Even though it’s our own money, we don’t get to keep it,” Hicks said.
The district has two buildings — one at the north end of town for prekindergarten through fifth grade and one at the south end for grades six through 12.
Those main educational buildings were built in 1929. Hicks said there was a small addition to the high school building in 1967 that added one room and then in 1973 they added five rooms and a science lab and there’s been nothing since then.
The district has no cafeteria, no teacher housing, no bus routes, no band and no track, to name a few deficits. Hicks said they have buses, but they are only used to transport students for extracurricular activities.
FDISD doesn’t pick up and deliver children in the morning and afternoon.
“We give any child who wants any some prepackaged food that we’ll give any child who shows up for breakfast,” Hicks said.
Typically, 12 students take advantage of that.
“I can’t pay teachers enough to buy a house down here because they can’t afford anything to buy. I don’t have teacher housing. Finding some place to rent is super difficult and expensive. We don’t waste our money. We have had such Spartan budgets for at least 10 years, I mean nickel and diming everything. At one point for a couple of years, we were making sandwiches for the kids to take out of town on their football trips or volleyball trips because I couldn’t afford to feed them at a restaurant,” Hicks said.
Born and raised in Fort Davis, Hicks went to school in the district and has served as a teacher and principal. He has been superintendent for eight years.
“My property values have risen 45 percent since 2012 and the state share to me has dropped 95 percent in that same period. That is the problem. There are other problems and there are other things that can be done, but that is the most simplistic explanation possible.”
