Fellow Taskmasters, I'm gonna try to get through this quick because I have too much material to go over as usual. But today I'm going to talk about school funding and the blue bonnet program. I'm gonna go over a couple of uh some myths that are out there. I'm gonna go ahead and debunk them, and then I'm
gonna tell you why uh the blue bonnet curriculum that's being pushed by SBOE, the State Board of Education, is not the answer. Before I continue, I do want to I do want to thank Frisco ISD. They invited me to a very awkward closed-door meeting with Jared Patterson and two other State House Republican State House representatives, um, Frederick Frazier and uh and one other, Matt
Shaheen. And I was the only Democrat in the room. The whole purpose was to make sure that the representatives and the candidates understood how finance works when it comes to our ISDs. And so they gave us this nice little slideshow. I'm gonna go over a couple of them. Some of this might be a little bit of information
you may already know. I'm gonna talk about the WADA. The Wada stands for the weighted average daily attendance. This is a formula that is determined by our state legislature. It determines how much money that goes to each of our independent school districts. Generally speaking, it goes like this: there's a number that
floats above every kid's head. That number is around six thousand dollars, uh specifically on here six thousand one hundred and sixty. And these numbers, that basic allotment number, that six thousand dollar number, gets multiplied based upon two variables. One, the kid's attendance at school, and two, their needs. For example, on this slide here, we can see how if someone attends 95% of the time, that can drag
that number down a little bit. But if if uh say, for example, this kid's special needs, that can be multiplied by 1.2. There are different weights that are applied to this basic allotment number. Again, that number is around $6,000. But what's the most important to know is that this number, the $6,000 number, has not been adjusted since the
year 2019. And we've had considerable inflation since then. So given the fact that the static number does not auto-adjust to inflation, and it's still still out of date, it means that our public education system as a whole. is being defunded due to inflation More specifically, if we wanted to keep the basic allotment up to inflation, we would have to increase the basic
allotment by $1,400. Something that both Frisco ISD has asked for and Denton ISDs asked for as well. I'll go over that in a little bit. But essentially, they really want to grab this home to myself and the other State House representatives. They basically have this chart here showing that, hey, look, in Frisco ISD, we're getting more money through our gold
pennies, our silver pennies, essentially our property taxes. But when you adjust it to inflation here, it's still not the same amount of dollar value coming into our independent school districts. This is something they basically asked for in the last very last slide. They were begging basically the statehouse records to please increase the basic allotment by $1,400.
And then there were secondly, they really wanted the basic allotment to auto adjust with inflation as inflation continues to basically take care of our future. So that was uh something that they were really asking for, and they're really trying to drill home that we have a massive surplus in Texas. We got money in the bank. We've all been paying a lot of money through our
property taxes, right? I don't think all feel that I do. And we got money in the bank. We can pay for independent school districts, our broken roads and utilities, and so many other things if only we would use our surplus. I don't know how if I can share the audio or how well the audio can't do the audio.
I'm gonna have to just go ahead and wing this. As I said, increase the basic allotment, increase it by at least $1,400, and we'll bring us back to the 2019 levels, not so ever since HD3019, any increase to the basic allotment is a guaranteed increase to our teachers's salaries. So I think someone down there said I want a $1,400 increase in the basic allotment.
Do you guys understand how much that costs? $800 million for a $100 increase to the basic allotment. That's $11.2 billion. Do the math for those few business people in here. $20 million surplus, $11.2 million, $112 billion going pub head when we know that a third of every dollar gets into the classroom with a teacher. I'm going to go into this just real quick because
I was really, really agitated that Mitch Little did this because there's a slide of hate here that I saw happening on the spot. He's trying to basically say that we have a $20 billion surplus. First, that's kind of true, but not quite right. I want to bring up this slide right here. We have, when it chairs, there we go.
Our actual surplus right now in Texas is $23.7 billion. Last session we had a $33 billion surplus. We had $10 more billion dollars in our surplus. We lost that because of Operation Lumstar, because our government's hemorrhaging that money away. Secondly, he's trying to say that I'm demanding for $11.2 billion to spend in our public education system. Actually, I would love it if we did, but we
don't really need to. If we increase the basic allotment by $1,000, that would only cost us $5.5 billion. I know that $5.5 billion sounds like a big number, but again, you have to understand. We currently have $23.7 billion surplus right now. And previously we had $33 billion. This money belongs to our public education systems.
I'm going to jump ahead real quick too, because I'm running out of time. So I want to talk about Blue Bonnet. Blue Bonnet is a scam being offered by our State Board of Education. What they're trying to say is that, hey, look, if you really want to increase the amount of funding coming to our school board districts, then adopt this optional curriculum
called Blue Bonnet. What Blue Bind actually is is a curriculum that infuses a church and Christian education into our public schools. It will basically slap the Bible into the laps of kindergartners and teach Bible studies from great kindergarten. through grade five And what they're doing, and the reason I went over the budgeting stuff, is because they're trying to say, hey,
look, if you adopt this blue blanket curriculum, we're going to give you $30 for every student that you have in your school. Now, I want you to hear that. $30. Not $300, $30. They're offering $30 per kid. All the meanwhile, Stephanie and I, we've been advocating for
over $1,000 increase to the basic lotment, right? They only want to give us $30. That barely covers the material. Because you've got to pay for the Bible and you've got to print out all the learning material that they're going to push. Not to mention which denomination of Christianity is going to be taught.
This is one of the things we always run into whenever we try to talk about Bible fused in curriculums. But I'm a bit out of time, but I want to touch on many can of worms that this opens up, and also I really want to go over the budgeting because they're trying to dangle this thread in front of our ISD saying, hey, look, if you really want this money, accept this curriculum.
But the reality is it's snapjack squat to what our ISDs really truly deserve. Thank you.
