Last week, the Houston Chronicle editorial board published an opinion piece titled “Robbing HISD” and suggested that we as voters have the opportunity in November to reject a “broken and busted” school finance system. They urged us to vote “against” HISD’s upcoming ballot measure and explained that doing so would allow us to save the district and its students the indignity of handing over $162,000,000 to the state.

The Chronicle was wrong.

Unfortunately, our choice on November 8th isn’t whether to submit to a $162 million recapture payment. Rather, it’s how do we want to pay what we owe. The consequences of our choice will determine whether the district and our students lose another $30 million over and above the $162 million HISD already owes the state, a $162 million cost the district planned for with painful budget cuts this past spring, a $162 million payment which trustees unanimously budgeted for in June.

The choice on the ballot for us is do we pay recapture the easy way—$162 million through attendance credits—or do we pay recapture the hard way—$192 million through the loss of taxable property.

Furthermore, voters should know the facts behind recapture and why many HISD trustees and other city leaders might be advocating for us to vote against the measure in order for them to either not have to make tough choices or explain hard votes in the future or to help them gamble their way out of the poor choices that brought HISD to this point.

But this is way more complicated than the Chronicle and many trustees would have us believe, so let’s start at the beginning and talk about how we got here...

ATTENDANCE AND ENROLLMENT.

Many opposed to HISD paying recapture describe it in terms of need. The Chronicle stated the fact “that the district with the largest number of poor families will have to give away critically needed resources” was a sign of a broken system. The Chronicle also characterized the ballot language about “attendance credits” as “misleading” and“obtuse vernacular.” These statements make it sound like those who wrote this editorial never bothered to read Chapter 41 of the Texas Education Code, otherwise known as Robin Hood, before telling us how to fix it.

On the contrary, the degree of need students have in a district has nothing to do with recapture. Certainly student need significantly impacts the amount of state aid a district receives, but that calculation is completely separate from the Robin Hood process. So separate even, that you find it in a completely different law—Texas Education Code Chapter 42.

So what does impact the recapture calculation? Attendance and enrollment.

What was truly misleading was for the Chronicle to dismiss Houston ISD’s status as property wealthy while altogether ignoring the concept of attendance and enrollment. The Chronicle’s editorial didn’t once use the word enrollment as it criticized the law and asked us for our vote.

So let’s take a look at how it really works.

For each student who is present in class each day, the district effectively earns a little piece of funding for next year’s budget—essentially they earn attendance credits as students show up for school. The overall enrollment for a district or school is calculated as its “Average Daily Attendance,” and that is used to allocate state funds to districts.

In the state’s calculation of whether a school district is property wealthy or not, it uses the combination of the number of students enrolled in schools and the amount of taxable property the district has available to fund those schools. A district being subject to recapture is essentially a district that has reached a specific limit of taxable property per student enrolled.

So when the legislature was devising a system to exchange value between property wealthy districts and property poor districts, they created a currency based on student enrollment called “attendance credits” and provided a method by which districts with too much property wealth relative to their student population could essentially “buy” additional credits from the state thereby transferring money from that property rich district to the state which, in turn, would owe additional funds to a property poor district that doesn’t have enough tax revenue relative to its enrollment size.

Looking at Houston ISD’s own financial statements and enrollment projections, we can see that property values and corresponding tax revenues have dramatically increased over the last five years, up 46%. Meanwhile, HISD’s student population hasn’t kept up, increasing at a mere 7.5% pace over the same period with enrollment predicted to remain flat through 2019.