The Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District (GCISD) is running out of runway, with a projected budget shortfall of over $6 million looming.
The district’s board of trustees was informed of the problem by Interim Chief Financial Officer Richard Matkin at a school board meeting last Monday.
“The sad thing about revenue for a property-wealthy district is we’re in a fully equalized system: increased property taxes … which result in an increase in tax collections usually nets out an increase in recapture,” said Matkin, referring to the mechanism by which the state redistributes tax dollars from property-wealthy districts.
“It’s a vicious cycle that hasn’t changed much over the course of my career,” he said.
Matkin outlined that the district is projected to be short roughly $6.3 million on its 2022-2023 school year budget.
With six months of data under review, Matkin that projected revenues are expected to fall short by $4.5 million, and projected spending is expected to overshoot the budget by $1.8 million. He pointed to increases in payroll and utility costs.
He also noted that GCISD would be receiving less taxpayer money from the state because student attendance/enrollment is coming in lower than initially projected, and state funding is tied to the number of students actually going to school in the district.
Despite its budgetary troubles, GCISD is one of the better-performing school districts in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, clocking a 95.7% on-time graduation rate for its Class of 2022, which is miles ahead of the Dallas Independent School District (DISD).
Last year, despite its massive $2.2 billion budget and the best efforts of its dedicated educators, DISD only managed to graduate 81.1% of its Class of 2022 on time.
The Dallas Express reached out to GCISD’s superintendent and board of trustees to ask them how they plan on handling the projected $6.3 million budget shortfall, but no response was forthcoming.
Disgusted with the out of place line comparing the huge and highly diverse school district of Dallas, to the combined school district of
the much smaller, less diverse, city of Grapevine and the tiny but overwhelmingly white, college educated, extremely affluent city of Colleyville. We hold fundraisers year round to meet the needs of our schools in GCISD & have many wealthy contributors. The families in DISD that send their kids to pubic school don’t have that advantage of making up the difference. But the main problem is that Texas is 48th in the nation for school funding, and it shows. We should emulate the top ranked states for public education in the nation : Massachusetts, New Jersey & Connecticut.