San Antonio Independent School District officials met Monday to discuss financial matters. As the district continues to struggle with student enrollment, it shared some promising projections in ongoing efforts to cut a budget deficit.
Dottie Carreon, SAISD’s chief financial officer, briefed the school board on the status of the district’s 2024-2025 budget and steps toward developing the 2025-2026 budget.
Trustees last June approved a $538 million general fund budget on the condition that reserves from a Strategic Initiatives Fund would be used to help cover a then-projected nearly $54 million revenue shortfall.
Carreon said the district is committed to overcoming the budget deficit as soon as possible. “We have set our sights on the long-term plan to correct this within three years.”
SAISD leaders have cited dropping student enrollment — particularly during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — as a major reason for budgetary challenges. The Texas Legislature oversees public schools funding, and last year, state lawmakers failed to advance a proposal to increase the amount that school districts receive per student.
“During COVID-19, [fiscal years 2020-2021 and 2021-2022], SAISD along with most all districts, experienced a significant drop in both enrollment and attendance, creating a single-year recurring, operating budget deficit of more than $40 million,” Carreon said.
According to Carreon, SAISD’s student enrollment declined from 44,635 in the 2023-2024 school year to 44,076 this year. The district has seen mostly negative student enrollment trends since at least 2013, when SAISD had 54,236 students, according to district officials.
Based on SAISD’s average daily attendance, the number that the state uses to help determine how much state and local funding a school district receives, the district is projected to receive $36,553 per day for the current school year, a decrease from $38,133 in 2023-2024.
Student attendance for the current school year is 91%, a slight increase over 90.6% in the first half of the 2023-2024 academic year, said Carreon. Based on these and other data points from the first 12 weeks of the school year, she said general fund revenues could be up to $4.3 million more than what was projected in the 2024-2025 budget. Those data points include a projected $4 million increase in the district’s special education allotment.
Carreon also told the board that general fund expenses are projected to be $8.6 million lower than the adopted 2024-2025 budget due to several measures, including vacant job positions being offset by the costs of using substitute teachers and contracted staffers, spending cuts at SAISD’s central office, fund reallocation and trustees’ decision in November 2023 to close 15 schools and merge or redesign five other campuses.
Altogether, district officials are now projecting a smaller deficit of $40.8 million at the end of this school year.
In planning the 2025-2026 school year budget, SAISD administrators project a slight uptick in student enrollment to 44,180, mainly because of the expansion of pre-K offerings.
Trustee Alicia Sebastian said the projected small increase in student enrollment next school year is a prime chance for SAISD to better market itself toward young families.
“It sounds like a wonderful opportunity to call action to our campuses — to start doing some real creative Innovative incentives to make sure that we are keeping those kids in the schools,” Sebastian said.
Board member Ed Garza asked whether SAISD has an aggressive campaign to retain current district students or enroll new ones in an environment where young families have more options for educating their children.
“I don’t hear any other strategy to increase enrollment in our schools, marketing and trying to win back students or new students,” he said.
SAISD Superintendent Jamie Aquino said efforts to retain students is a matter of word-of-mouth publicity about a specific campus.
“We want to achieve this because we’re going to put more dollars into marketing or certain schools that are being supported in ways perhaps that they haven’t been in the past,” Aquino said.
A budget committee will meet Jan. 23, and SAISD trustees are scheduling a Feb. 13 budget work session where discussion priorities will include a general pay hike, suggestions for reductions to further chip away at the deficit and where the Texas Legislature stands on public school funding.
