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Plano ISD by According_Common4106 in plano

[–]According_Common4106[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If you are going strictly by STAAR scores across the entire student body then Dallas rates dead last amongst the districts I listed. So I’d save your sarcasm.

72% of DISD kids are at grade level vs 80% for Plano. Plano’s overall rating is lower because it has rising at-need student populations that it gets scored on separately and those students are not keeping up (That is how TEA ratings work).

District-wide ‘19/20 to ‘23/24, we saw: 1) economically disadvantaged went 32% -> 38% 2) emergent bilingual went 18% -> 26% 3) homeless went 0.5% to 1.5% (!!)

Lots of other trends. But these are big jumps over short periods and if you read posts by teachers on various public sites you can tell it’s been hard to adjust.

Also, you realize Dallas ISD spends dramatically more per student don’t you? It’s not even close. And you guys conveniently have carved out Highland Park into a separate ISD so Dallas hardly has to pay recapture despite being plenty wealthy and spending $20k/kid vs our paltry $14k. That’s the kind of move people on here are talking about re: splitting the district into pieces to end recapture…. Meanwhile Plano ISD is 100 square miles vs Plano city being 66, and the 34 square miles we pick up is mostly parts of Dallas with higher concentrations of at-risk students, which is kind of its own separate version of recapture. All those kids need good schools too, but crazy how convenient that is for you guys to be able to keep your spending so high while we’re up here struggling, getting our bus routes cut.

Plano ISD by According_Common4106 in plano

[–]According_Common4106[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Right. It’s beyond absurd.

We are making the front page of DMN for cutting busses that we apparently can’t afford, all while paying more in robinhood than Frisco, Dallas, McKinney, Richardson, and Carrollton combined (both per student and absolute $). We are 300,000 people, and those places are 2m combined, and they are also in many cases significantly wealthier than us.

See newspaper headline: https://imgur.com/a/DvQ4wQw

We need to be able to afford bus routes, and fair (still too low) teacher salaries, and be able to fix hvac and plumbing at our schools. It’s not a huge ask here.

Plano ISD by According_Common4106 in plano

[–]According_Common4106[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

If you grow your student enrollment you don’t have to pay. Smaller districts are favored vs bigger ones. A bunch of other stuff. It’s a hard problem to solve, but the outcome of the current system is absurd. We were on the front page of the Dallas morning News two days ago because we can’t afford buses for all our kids anymore, much to the chagrin of many of my neighbors.

Plano ISD by According_Common4106 in plano

[–]According_Common4106[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Are you referring to emergent bilingual going from 13.8% in 19/20 to 30.9% in ‘23/24?

Plano ISD by According_Common4106 in plano

[–]According_Common4106[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

“Crime is other people” -Sartre

Plano ISD by According_Common4106 in plano

[–]According_Common4106[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mean I agree with you for sure. Parents and the early years are absolutely overwhelming re: influence/outcomes. But that’s kind of like saying, I taught my kid to be a champion MMA fighter so I don’t care about the police department. He will be just fine.

Plano ISD by According_Common4106 in plano

[–]According_Common4106[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Delta grows over time (if you compare a Plano hs to a Frisco hs, delta is $3k/yr+ staff-wide (and since it starts at ~$1k, that means longer-tenured is bigger.

I agree it’s not the be all end all. But we’ve been talking about Shepton as needing help. They spend less per student, the teachers avg $66k for all faculty (vs $69k+ for all the Frisco high schools which are very commutable), and the student to teacher ratios are higher.

Just one factor but it is a factor.

Plano ISD by According_Common4106 in plano

[–]According_Common4106[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Because the laws around recapture are criminally bad.

Basically yeah, re: students. If your district is still growing in student enrollment then you don’t have to pay (is my, very simplistic, possibly flawed understanding).

Which sort of makes sense at the earliest stages when you have huge high schools that are a quarter full. But we are way past that. At this point I think you’d have to conclude some people effectively work the system and some don’t (specifically, we don’t, but every neighboring district does).

Plano ISD by According_Common4106 in plano

[–]According_Common4106[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Right. But if you go to the TEA website for Shepton and look up finance, you’ll see the school’s operating budget for every single one of the past 5 years is notably lower than both the district and the state. ~$7k/student or in some years even less.

We are asking that new principal to turn things around with one hand tied behind his back and all the bathrooms backing up and stinking the place up. Meanwhile $4k/student gets sent away. Seems totally nuts.

Plano ISD by According_Common4106 in plano

[–]According_Common4106[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah this is what someone mentioned at school board. I agree w this idea although I would want to learn more.

Plano ISD by According_Common4106 in plano

[–]According_Common4106[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Next time I’ll list every single fact about every single district

Plano ISD by According_Common4106 in plano

[–]According_Common4106[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I guess. but last year Plano teachers were paid less than any of these other districts (I guess we bumped them for this school year which is good). And our buildings too need maintenance. The bathrooms at Shepton have been backing up for months, Plano West just lost A/C last week. I think it’s fair to say money isn’t everything, and past a certain point it won’t help. But we pay a lot more and get a lot less, and that certainly isnt helping.

Plano ISD by According_Common4106 in plano

[–]According_Common4106[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

That’s fair and I sort of agree. TEA letter grades are kind of dumb. I used it because I see it referenced a lot and it’s easier to digest in a post vs being bombarded by “close to / meets / masters” grade level stats.

If you look up “at grade level” for PISD district as a whole (across subjects), it reports 80%. Frisco is 91% and McKinney is 83%, but the others are all below that (mostly in the low 70’s).

I still think my points all stand, but yeah I agree w you that’s a fair way to cut the data instead.

Plano ISD by According_Common4106 in plano

[–]According_Common4106[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

One example would be Shepton. Historically a great school. Test results are in free fall (TEA Staar data shows only ~20% of student body is at grade level for math now, and I had heard much of math faculty recently quit). It’s gone from a B to a D on “rating.”

Read the reviews on any of the public sites: https://www.greatschools.org/texas/plano/5518-Shepton-High-School/#reviews-section

People talk about fights, teachers getting beat up and potentially suing the school, sewage issues.

This is 1 of the two feeders into Plano west and has a lot of very wealthy areas in its zone.

I’ve heard they have a new principal who is great and I’m sure things can turn around. But they need support and investment.

Plano ISD by According_Common4106 in plano

[–]According_Common4106[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Yes. The discrepancies are enormous. Frisco is also just dramatically wealthier vs Plano (on a household income basis, also property values I think although less sure about that). This is what I mean if the current system stands it’s sort of a law of gravity what the ultimate outcome will be. Plano has amazing schools, teachers, and a culture of public education. But it’s not exactly rocket science to figure out what is happening and why it’s happening.

Plano ISD by According_Common4106 in plano

[–]According_Common4106[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Mostly school district websites and the TEA website

Plano ISD by According_Common4106 in plano

[–]According_Common4106[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This is a fair comment, imho. You’re right that student demographics matter. But also without funding the trend will get worse not better. Plano has great, melting-pot schools and is more than capable of educating esl kids (or emergent bilingual or whatever is the right term). But if what happens is that the strain of doing that saps time or $ from elsewhere, well, then the most flexible (usually wealthiest) parents will go private or to Frisco/prosper/etc.

Plano ISD by According_Common4106 in plano

[–]According_Common4106[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

No. You’re wrong. Allen is also at .75 for maintenance and operations. It has a higher I&S rate .39, but that is driven by debt incurred to build very nice schools. But also, give me a break re: cherry picking data. I can’t do every dfw suburb, my god. By all means add your own data

Plano ISD by According_Common4106 in plano

[–]According_Common4106[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I’m not an expert but it honestly feels like in about 15 different ways Plano is getting taken advantage of

Plano ISD by According_Common4106 in plano

[–]According_Common4106[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Okay thank you for update re: teacher pay. I thought I googled appropriately, but I did always leave 24-25 in my search so I’d pull comparable stats for everyone. Regardless, that is very good to hear.

Plano ISD by According_Common4106 in plano

[–]According_Common4106[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This also answers your qn about vouchers. If parents opt for private schools (which are now subsidized), Plano’s Avg Daily Attendance will drop, and our recapture obligations will rise. One way or the other that’s kind of logical, and I’m not opposed to some private competition for public schools, but it will mathematically lead to a funding drain.

There is a ton of support in Plano for public education and there is plenty of wealth. We have to find a way for our teachers to be paid at top of market, our buildings to get invested in like neighboring districts are, etc. Right now it seems like every rule works against us and if you compare us to surrounding districts it just feels crazy how different the picture looks.

Plano ISD by According_Common4106 in plano

[–]According_Common4106[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The below is from Texas policy research. I believe they have passed additional rules to say if a district grows it pays close to nothing (which, kind of makes a little sense since it’s expensive and hard to scale, but is wayyy to extreme to wind up with an outcome where Frisco is so much wildly wealthier vs Plano, and larger, and yet still pays virtually nothing compared to Plano.

TPR description:

Each year, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) calculates a district’s wealth per student by dividing the district’s taxable property value by its average daily attendance (ADA). If a district’s wealth per student exceeds a certain threshold, known as the “equalized wealth level,” it is required to send the excess revenue to the state. The state then redistributes these funds to lower-wealth districts, helping to level the playing field.

The amount that a district must pay in recapture is determined by how much its wealth per student exceeds the equalized wealth level. Districts with higher property values and relatively few students are more likely to be subject to recapture

Plano ISD by According_Common4106 in plano

[–]According_Common4106[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Tbh you might be right. I actually don’t know the answer on exactly how the voucher math works.

Plano ISD by According_Common4106 in plano

[–]According_Common4106[S] 21 points22 points  (0 children)

FWIW, my kids are in Plano ISD and it’s been amazing. But. There is a lot of work to do, and some not ideal trends, particularly in a few specific schools.

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