Upcoming Membership Meeting
We will conduct our fall membership meeting virtually this year, so we hope you can make plans to attend. We have some business to conduct, including the election of officers, and members will receive an update on all the latest information. Our membership meeting will be on Wednesday, September 16, at 1:30 p.m.
Also, please mark your calendar for our membership meeting on Wednesday, November 11 at 1:30 p.m. We will be providing post-election analysis as well as making some plans for 2021. More details to come.
Priorities for the 87th Legislative Session
The Coalition's priorities for the upcoming 87th Legislative Session were recently adopted. They are as follows:

  • Recognize and respond to the pandemic’s impact on public education
  • Prioritize students when making difficult budget choices
  • Prevent increased recapture in any form
  • Preserve local control and flexibility
  • Keep the funding for public schools with public schools

We've fleshed each of those out and given some more background details on our website. Click here to see our priorities for the 87th Legislative Session. Or if you would rather, you can also access all that info in a PDF.

Additionally, we've created an itemized list of goals for each of those priorities to make our goals clear.
Interim committee requests for info
Given the fact that legislative committees are unable to meet at this time, many House committees have issued requests for information for feedback on their interim charges that will inform their reports to the 87th Legislature. The House Committee on Public Education has even issued some guiding questions with their requests. You can click on the link below to see an overview of all the House Committee interim charges and requests for information that pertain to public education in any form.

The Texas School Coalition will be submitting responses to many of these requests for information, but we also wanted to bring this to your attention in case your individual district would like to submit feedback, especially to some of the questions about individual district decisions and experiences.

The deadline to submit most of this feedback is Wednesday, September 30 (with the exception of the House Committee on Pensions, Investments, and Financial Services, which has a submission deadline of today!).
Apply for CARES Act CRF reimbursement
Don't forget that the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM) is administering the Coronavirus Relief Fund (CRF) for school districts, which provides funding to cover up to 75% of eligible expenditures. The deadline to submit paperwork for this reimbursement is September 30, but in order to apply districts must first create an account to do so by September 7. As of yesterday, only 185 school districts had taken that step. Please check to make sure your district has created an account and ensure that all paperwork is submitted so that you don't miss out on valuable resources.

Allowable uses of the funds include necessary expenditures related to the pandemic that incurred between March 1-May 20, 2020. These expenses could be related to distance learning (including technology), payroll and benefits of staff responsible for developing online learning or otherwise continuing instruction or other responses to the COVID-19 related closures.

There is a cap for how much each school district may receive. Reimbursement amounts may not exceed the greater of either $50,000 or $250 per district comp ed student.  For more information, including the links to set up that account by Sept. 7, please see: 
 

Center for School Finance
We are pleased to announce that our continued friendship and partnership with the Texas Association of School Business Officials (TASBO). The models TASBO developed for our members during the 2019 legislative session proved both informative and helpful for our districts. Not only that, but they have proven to be more accurate than other models and projections developed at the same time. In 2021, Coalition member districts will once again have access to models for your school district during the legislative session to help give you an idea of what different legislative proposals might mean for your district. Those models will be built on standard data available from TEA.

If you would like to have models built on up-to-date data input by your district, we encourage you to consider TASBO's Center for School Finance. The Center provides members of this service with regular updates and work closely with members to ensure they have what they need to plan ahead for their district, including multi-year summary and detail reports that show LPE information along with a DPE scenario using district-provided data so that settle-up does not come as a surprise. 
Election of Coalition Officers
In the fall of every even-numbered year the Coalition membership is asked to elect officers to serve the organization for a two-year term. The Executive Committee has proposed the following slate of officers for the election to be conducted at the membership meeting on September 16:

President - Kyle Lynch, Superintendent, Seminole ISD

Vice President - Sara Bonser, Superintendent, Plano ISD

Secretary/Treasurer - Scott Marshall, Superintendent, Sundown ISD

If you would like to learn more about the volunteer board members who serve on our Executive Committee, please visit the leadership page of our website.
Member Resources
Please feel free to visit the Members Area of our website at any time. Simply click on the red Login button and then use your email address for access.

Also, don't forget these resources that may be helpful for your district:




And we're always happy to hear suggestions and requests for resources and tools that would be helpful to you. Let us know what you need!
Thank you to our annual sponsors!
601 Camp Craft Road
Austin, Texas 78746
512-732-9072