MARFA — Marfa ISD leaders are pushing to adopt a balanced budget for the 2025-26 school year considering the district’s fund balance, or savings account, often drawn from to help cover persisting deficits, is quickly dwindling.
At a meeting on Monday Chief Financial Officer Rosela Rivera said the deficit for this year is currently projected to be around half a million dollars — a loss the district can no longer afford to make up. “Pretty much, this is it,” Rivera said in a follow up with The Big Bend Sentinel. “We’re not going to have any fund balance.”
The district has drawn on its savings the past three years, $101,000 in 2022-23, $381,000 in 2023-24 and last school year, although that total is not yet known. The fund balance account was somewhat bolstered by the sale of the Blackwell School which netted the district $530,000.
The fund balance currently contains around $2.3 million, Rivera said. But the district has yet to make an estimated $1.6 million recapture payment — funds the district sends to the state because it is considered to have “excess wealth” per student due to the combination of low enrollment and high property values — for last school year, Rivera said, and the rest of the balance will go towards covering monthly bills and payroll. She said she anticipates the district will have virtually zero savings by the end of this school year.
She also warned School Board trustees this week that the district could be in hot water even earlier, possibly experiencing “cash flow issues” over the next couple of months until their largest annual tax payment arrives in November. (The district’s primary income comes from local tax revenue.)
In order to try and alleviate the current deficit, Interim Superintendent Arturo Alferez is working to secure more partnerships with early childhood centers out of El Paso; a program launched last year that involves dual enrolling pre-K through second grade students and splitting additional state funds received for average daily attendance (ADA) with private partner schools. The deals involve paperwork and the exchange of data, rather than the transportation of hundreds of kids.
So far, Marfa ISD has entered into 15 partnerships. Of the 262 students currently enrolled in the district, 87 are from early childhood center partners and 175 are traditional in-person students. The district has been struggling with declining enrollment for years. Not long ago in 2019, the enrollment at the start of the school year was 341 students compared to today’s 175 students — a roughly 49% decrease.
The district’s current goal is to raise its enrollment to 300 students, meaning Alferez will have to partner with additional centers to dual enroll around 40 more students. “We really need to hit the partnerships hard and try to save as much as we can,” Rivera said to trustees, with Alferez assuring them the enrollment goal is achievable.
District leaders are focusing on enrollment as the solution to addressing the deficit because as the district’s enrollment goes up — even if it’s not from students physically on campus — its recapture payment goes down. If 300 students are enrolled it will bring the projected $1 million payment for this school year down to $800,000, Rivera said, lessening the deficit to around $300,000. She said enrollment would have to swell to around 400 or 500 to drop the recapture payment down to zero.
Board members are set to adopt a deficit budget on Monday, and revisit it in six weeks time to reassess enrollment and the projected recapture payment. Trustees spoke on Monday about various ways to save the district money next year — from potential property sales to shutting down the cafeteria to cuts to programs and staff — acknowledging difficult conversations were coming.
Rivera said increased student attendance — a major factor driving state funding — would also help bring in more revenue. Trustees discussed ways to explain the situation to parents, but worried the message wouldn’t stick.
“Nobody truly believes that if I don’t send my kids to school, the school’s gonna suffer financially and will eventually shut down,” trustee Stela Fuentez said. “They don’t connect that. That’s not a priority to them.”
“It’ll be a priority when it does shut down,” Board President Teresa Nuñez said.
The district’s state aid rose dramatically compared to last year, from $35,000 to $283,000 — money that had to be spent on teacher and support staff raises and for an increase in the student basic allotment. “We are getting more money per kid but those allotments are fixed to certain spending,” Rivera said.
But where the district is really suffering, in addition to recapture, is with aging facilities, Rivera said. Last school year it had to pay for $70,000 worth of repairs to the cafeteria HVAC and freezer. This year’s budget doesn’t contain any big ticket items, but things come up, Rivera said. Teacher housing in need of a new $35,000 roof, the elementary school HVAC and a new fleet of vehicles and buses — all of the district’s Suburbans have over 200,000 miles on them — are on the backburner, she said.
Marfa ISD will be debt-free and have all previous bonds paid off in two to three years if all goes according to plan. The district’s debt is managed in a separate fund with its own tax rate. It is unclear whether trustees intend to go out for another bond election after the previous failure of a $57 million proposal for a new K-12 building in 2022.
The idea to hire an individual to manage, and expand, the early childhood education partnership program has been discussed, but is not currently being pursued due to budget constraints. The question of whether or not the program is truly sustainable is still up in the air. Legislation that ultimately failed this past session attempted to dictate the ADA revenue percentages in favor of the early childhood centers, and the ongoing voucher roll out could include a provision preventing students from dual enrolling in a public and private school concurrently. But Alferez said he is in contact with the Texas Education Agency (TEA) as well as program leaders in Fort Davis and Alpine and, for now, there is no imminent threat to the initiative.
Alferez said the district is also looking at other ways to maximize its budget — offsetting 10-15% of salaries with federal funds, participating in the BBRISE initiative, pursuing grants, re-coding classes to get more career technical education (CTE) credits, like changing course names from “journalism” to “digital media” and yearbook to “graphic design” and more.
“If it’s allowable, we’ll find it,” Alferez said.