Alpine ISD Short Budget

ODESSA, Texas (KOSA) - Alpine ISD is short on its budget and is not receiving enough money from the state of Texas.

Alpine ISD is once again not getting the funding they need from the state of Texas to renovate their school districts and getting the resources they need.

This has been a major problem for Alpine ISD in the last ten years.

The state school funding system is making things worse for many rural school districts... including Alpine... causing more financial trouble.

“Alpine ISD loses millions of dollars every year to these comptrollers disputes, especially how they underfund rural districts and many districts like us and that is representing a ten percent drop in our overall allotment,” said Alpine ISD Dr. Michelle Rinehart.

Whenever state and county officials disagree on how much schools should get from property taxes it leaves a huge gap in school budgets.

Alpine ISD needs one million dollars a year from the state to help balance its budget... but for years has received hundreds of dollars less than that.

“What that one-million-dollar loss looks like in alpine is a number of things. It means deflated salaries across the board for teachers and support staff and for example we pay our teachers just above state minimum.” said Rinehart.

Teachers in Alpine earn about thirty-five thousand dollars, but the state average is sixty thousand dollars.

The short budget not only affects the teachers but the students too.

“So, one of the things we can’t do because of the underfunding is we can’t provide state of the art computers and all the resources that they won’t be able to have in other school districts that don’t have this problem.” said Alpine middle school principal Judith Pardo Alferez

Schools in Alpine are in need of maintenance, which it has been piling up over the years.

“When you lose millions of dollars of funding year over year there are so many things you can’t do. We have fire alarms systems that are thirty years old, and we have turf that has a lifetime for ten years that’s in year twelve.” said Rinehart.

Alpine ISD is the fifteenth lowest funded school district in the state of Texas in the state of Texas over eleven hundred school districts in Texas.

Copyright 2023 KOSA. All rights reserved.