TRI-COUNTY — School districts across Texas are taking notice of Fort Davis ISD’s new early childhood education partnership program after it managed to raise the district’s state allotment from $70,000 to $1.35 million last year.
The funding windfall comes from one-year renewable legal agreements with early childhood schools that dual enroll pre-kindergarten through second-grade students with FDISD in exchange for 50% of the additional state aid the district receives for those students.
The arrangements are largely clerical in nature — involving the sharing of attendance numbers and assessment results rather than facilities and students — which has allowed FDISD to partner with schools across the state. Partner schools may continue to charge tuition fees or be religiously affiliated despite entering into these agreements with public school districts.
This year, FDISD has a total of 640 students enrolled and 20 active partnerships. Superintendent Graydon Hicks said the district is aiming to end the year with 900 to 1,000 kids enrolled, raising their allotment to an estimated $4 million. Before the district implemented the program they had 170 students enrolled.
Hicks said the program has been a game changer for his financially-struggling, rural district. The district’s goal is to grow their fund balance, or savings account, and raise salaries for all district employees with new revenue from the partnerships, he said. “This is a huge, huge benefit,” Hicks said. “This is a total transformation of our financial status.”
Now, he and Deputy Superintendent Michelle Hartmann want to help other districts establish their own programs. “The more people that are doing it, the more support we can gather from legislators or influencers in Austin,” he added.
Last week the Marfa ISD School Board authorized Interim Superintendent Arturo Alferez to enter into a contract with FDISD to establish an early childhood education program at Marfa ISD. The one-year agreement, which is pending review from MISD’s lawyers, involves an upfront fee and additional 10% fee of the total extra funding that’s generated.
The upfront fee is $3,000 per partnership for up to five partnerships, and increases to an hourly rate beyond that, Hicks said. He said FDISD moved to offer consulting services to other districts after interested partners exceeded FDISDs capacity and other districts expressed interest in setting up their own programs. But he didn’t just want to “give away” the work they’d spent building the program, he said.
“We’ve worked very, very hard. We’ve had to spend money on attorneys to get interlocal agreements written, memorandums of understanding written, setting up attendance, accounting procedures and processes,” Hicks said. “It’s a lot.”
While Hartmann and Hicks will help locate partners for Marfa and assist with setting up the program, Alferez will take on running the program within the district.
Hicks plans to use the extra money generated from the consulting program to help offset the additional costs of running the program in his district. While he and Hartmann are currently the main coordinators, it is likely that FDISD will hire two to three more employees to help manage its early childhood education program, he said.
Alferez said while Marfa will pursue the early childhood education program with the help of Fort Davis, specific partnerships or agreements are not yet in place.
He said the district’s goal is to enroll an additional 150 to 200 students through the program, which will help bring them out of their deficit budget and could help alleviate the district’s hefty recapture payments. “If it wasn’t for recapture, we would have never been in a deficit budget,” Alferez said. “We have to do something in light of that to increase our finances.”
The district’s enrollment has been on continuous decline, and was 194 at the start of the school year, compared to 341 in 2019.
Alferez said Marfa ISD does not currently plan to hire someone to manage the early childhood education partnerships in-house but may consider doing so in the future if the initiative is successful. For now, Alferez said he plans to learn from Hartmann and build off of what FDISD has already established.
“They already have the blueprint for this,” Alferez said. “The contract that we have, it’s a year contract, so if next year we feel like, ‘Oh, we’ve gotten a grasp of it. We understand the system,’ We can always go seek these out on our own.”
Alferez, echoing previous sentiments of Hicks and Alpine Superintendent Michelle Rinehart, whose district also engages in the program, said Marfa ISD’s involvement is only necessary due to their dire financial situation. (The district adopted a $1 million plus deficit budget for the second year in a row this school year.)
“It all has to do with funding,” Alferez said. “Being hostage to school finance at the state capitol, we have to do something on our side to secure [more funds]. We have to do something to stay open.”