Midland ISD plans to sue Texas officials over the state’s Robin Hood system, sparking renewed debate over public school funding.
The Midland school district trustees voted on July 21 to proceed with a lawsuit against Education Commissioner Mike Morath and other state leaders, arguing that funding restrictions, particularly a mandate known as recapture, inhibited them from raising and spending money to meet their students’ needs.
Recapture, or “Robin Hood”, passed in 1993, ordering school districts that received more local property tax revenue than the state deemed necessary to send excess funds back to the state to be redistributed to lower-income districts.
It came about after a predominantly Hispanic and low-income Edgewood school district in San Antonio, along with other underfunded campuses, sued Texas over disparities between the resources that students attending their schools received and students of more affluent communities.
Originally, recapture mainly affected wealthy suburban and oil-rich districts, with only 34 school districts redistributing funding through the system the year after the law was passed.
Last year, 225 school districts were affected by recapture due to local economic growth, sending nearly $3 billion back to the state. These include districts in major urban communities with declining enrollment and high numbers of students in poverty.
Midland has ranked in the top 10 of recapture districts over the last decade, according to the Texas School Coalition, paying more than $83 million for recapture this school year, representing 27% of the district’s $313 million generated locally.
Despite the fact that 55% of the district’s students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which the state and federal government consider a measure of poverty. Midland school trustees claim the number of low-income students in the district demonstrates that property tax wealth does not necessarily equate to educational wealth.
In their lawsuit, the Midland trustees contend that recent changes to Texas’ education funding system “unfairly deprive local communities of decision-making power over how they tax residents,” instead granting that authority to the education commissioner.
Under the present system, the education commissioner sets the tax rate for school districts, while before local school boards were able to do so within a certain range determined by the state. Meanwhile, state leaders have imposed requirements on how districts can spend money raised locally, preventing districts from addressing particular needs, according to the Midland trustees.
“They’re setting the tax rate. We collect the taxes. We send it to the state,” stated Josh Guinn, the Midland school board president. “Then we get blamed as a local district and local board member for taxes being high. It’s just a revolving door.”
The trustees also claim that state leaders are using recapture in place of proper school funding, while prioritizing investments in charter schools and voucher programs allowing families to use public funding for private or home schools, instead of investing in traditional neighborhood campuses.
So far, recapture has survived three legal challenges in the past three decades, the most recent in 2016.
Advocates fear that, without recapture, schools in property- wealthy districts would receive more funding to educate their students than those in poorer neighborhoods, creating educational disparities disadvantaging children already underserved. There are also arguments that the problem is not recapture specifically, but inconsistent and unreliable state funding.
Notably, this lawsuit comes at a time when GOP state leaders, including Governor Greg Abbott, are pushing to abolish school property taxes entirely.