Texas Civil Rights Project: AISD Guilty Of Fundraising Disparities Between Schools

The Texas Civil Rights Project released a report last month entitled, “Austin Independent School District: Inequitable Funding and Vestiges of Segregation,” that claims Austin Independent School District  supports the private subsidization of programs at its higher income schools while making only a weak effort to ensure that public money for poor students gets to them. AISD officials made no effort to counter, adding that the results did not come as a surprise and saying they would review the findings as part of their own funding analysis.

Representatives of the Texas Civil Rights Project, who worked on the 106-page report for a year, compared how much money schools raised through public and private resources and said in the report that the district should do a better job tracking exactly how much is raised and spent per student at every school. Texas Civil Rights Project then proposed a “tithing recommendation” where schools would be able to keep only the first $10,000 of what they raise and keep only two-thirds of the rest. There were other recommendations as well.

TCRP was founded in 1990 as part of Oficina Legal del Pueblo Unido, a non-profit community-based foundation located in South Texas. In addition to a statewide office in Austin, the organization has offices in South Texas, El Paso, and Midland/Odessa.

Click here for a PDF of the entire Texas Civil Rights Project report.