The Texas Education Agency announced Feb. 12 that it is revoking Tioga ISD's accreditation.
What that means for the district is still unclear, which is why Superintendent Josh Ballinger and six community members will go to Austin on March 3 to meet with TEA officials.
'When we started this whole process, we told TEA this is going to be a five-year fix, not an overnight or a year or two down the road, and to our benefit, we've stuck with that, even maybe exceeded [expectations] some of those years,' TISD board President Dallas Slay said. 'I don't think anybody expected us to improve our budget situation by $2.5 million in one year.'
He also mentioned TISD's TEA-appointed conservator, Dr. Karen Wiesman, who monitors TISD's finances and has been encouraging and reassuring the district that it has made vast improvements in its financial accounting and budgeting processes during her nearly three years of working with the district.
Tioga ISD officials expressed their hope in the work they have done to meet the requirements communicated by the state to correct their fiscal crisis.
'My hope is that they will see the big picture and acknowledge that in a time where public education is failing across the entire country, we actually are doing it right here, and we are educating our kids,' Slay said.
He pointed to the district's graduation percentage, the number of students who obtain an associate's degree before graduating from TISD and the district's other extracurricular successes as evidence of that work.
The accreditation revocation is based on a formula that looks at academic and financial accountability scores.
Each Financial Integrity Rating System of Texas rating is based on the school year before it is announced.
In the 2019-20 FIRST rating, Tioga ISD received a 70, with the passing score that year set at 60 by the state, which was increased to 70 the following year.
From the 2020-21 FIRST rating on, TISD has received an F in financial accountability, with grades of 62 out of 70, 64 of 70, 60 of 70, 44 of 70, and 58 of 70, chronologically.
' Anytime you have a negative general fund and a negative debt service fund, you're going to start pretty well at 70 on the scoring scale of FIRST, so any trouble, it just compounds itself,' Ballinger said. '… It was somewhat inevitable. We already knew that we had failed Fiscal Year '23.'
That prompted him to reach out to the state in September to have guidance on what would happen if the state revoked the accreditation, which is a question he's still asking.
TISD academics have remained on an overall positive trajectory, despite the reduction in force in December 2022 that resulted in 20 employees being let go, followed by 13 more staff vacancies through attrition in the summer of 2023.
'The last three and a half years have been hard, but we weren't asked to do anything just astronomically hard,' Ballinger said. 'And we would love to have those positions back, but it was a luxury when we had them.'
Those cuts led to the budget surplus that TISD saw in the last fiscal year, he added.
When the district's financial dilemma originally came to light, it was under the direction of Dr. Charles Holloway, with Ballinger serving as the assistant superintendent.
Of the current board, Secretary Ryan Walters, elected in May 2020, and President Dallas Slay, elected May 2021, have been in office spanning from the first FIRST failure, which accounted for the 2019-20 school year, to today.
Ballinger credited the leaders of the district with helping the community bring back its high school students and build the high school campus.
He also referred to the building during the Monday evening meeting, saying 'the elephant in the room is literally where we're sitting.'
'We'll slowly get this moved over to our debt service side as the years progress,' Ballinger said. 'The values don't [support that] for that right now.'
Restructuring the debt from the lease-purchase structure that had the district pay for the building out of the maintenance and operations budget to the debt service side through the May 2024 $26 million bond election was a huge step in correcting the budget deficit reflected on the FIRST ratings, Ballinger said.
'Try to explain to people that you want them to approve over $26 million and they're not getting anything new out of it,' he said. '… I try not to let my mind wander that far out, but if it would not have passed, we would be having entirely different conversations.'
Recently, TISD's bond rating from S&P Global Ratings improved from B to B+, 'with an outlook upgraded as well to 'stable,'' Ballinger said.
He hopes the district's fate will be clearer after the March 3 meeting in Austin.
'The focus on the March 3 meeting will be to listen,' Ballinger said. 'The commissioner will probably have a lot to say to us. … The focus of our group is going to be to advertise all the reasons that we should continue, and there are many, as a school district in Texas and do a good job teaching kids.'
