With the Federal stop-gap bill amended and approved the flow of some funding for Texas is changing.
Texas Insider Report: AUSTIN Texas Texas will be able to spend their Federal education grants any way they choose after a provision in the Federal stop-gap bill approved by Congress repealed the so-called Doggett Amendment which would have prevented Governor Rick Perry from diverting any of the education funding elsewhere reports the Star-Telegram. The repeal was championed by U.S. Representative Michael Burgess who convinced House Speaker John Boehner to keep it in during last weeks intense budget negotiations.
Perry has previously called the Doggett Amendment a cheap political stunt" and said its requirement that the government would spend a set amount of money on education over three years violates the Texas constitution which limits state budgets to two-year cycles. The Amendment would have required the state to compute funding allocations using the Title I formula which is based on percentage of poor students in each district. Now state officials are saying they will be using a different formula based on total number of students enrolled.
Under the current plan some districts are looking to receive much less funding than they would have under the Title I disbursement. Fort Worth School District for example will now get $12 million not the $21.8 million they were expecting. In preparation for the shortfall district trustees have already voted to lay off 80 employees.
Still most feel that even a little bit of additional funds will have a large effect. Hank Johnson the chief financial officer for the Fort Worth school district hopes that as the government starts distributing the money the problem with budget deficits will get less acute:
If it flows through it could reduce the amount of cuts were seeing. Right now were so far in the hole that anything we get will help. Id rather get the larger portion but well take anything we can get."
