$3.66/HR

What does it cost to educate a child in Harleton ISD? That is the question that I wanted to answer due to the latest coverage on the national, state, and local medias. They have called for schools to be more efficient, and I don't blame them. We all want our tax dollars to be spent efficiently don't we?

Let's first take a look at what the state guarantees our district in terms of revenues. The way the school finance system works in Texas is that each school has been assigned a Target Revenue Number based upon data and revenues from 2006. This number has remained essentially the same since that time. By taking the Target Revenue Number and multiplying that number by a district's Weighted Average Daily Attendance number (WADA, this is the state's formula for realizing that some students cost more to educate than others) a district is able to essentially determine what their guaranteed revenues will be.

What does this mean for Harleton ISD? Our district's Target Revenue Number is $4952 (the lowest in Harrison County). If I take this number and multiply it by our number of WADA (approximately 1000), then I get a guaranteed revenue of $4,952,000. This amount consists of local tax monies plus whatever state monies have to be added to equal that amount. In other words, if your property values increase, then the state's share decreases.

These are big numbers and probably don't mean a whole lot to you. Let's break it down so that we can tell exactly what the state is guaranteeing that our district will have in order to educate your children. If we take the Target Revenue Number ($4952) and divide that by the number of school days (180) and then divide by the number of hours in a school day (7.5) we get the hourly rate that is being spent to educate your child. The number comes to a whopping $3.66/hr. We are able to provide transportation, food service, extra curricular activities, and instruction from certified teachers for less than what you could pay a babysitter.

Harleton ISD is doing more with less. Let our state legislature know that they must take care of their responsibilities to our children.