TEA Will Open Attendance Projections for Next Biennium October 15

By Amanda Brownson posted 10-12-2018 09:39

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On Monday October 15, TEA will open its attendance projections system for next biennium. Because the Texas legislature writes a two year budget, these numbers are needed now so that budget writers can begin planning for the next biennium. You have the opportunity to submit overall attendance counts and counts for attendance and FTEs under your special programs. If you have noticed changes in special program trends (like special education or career and technology education), you should work closely with your programs staff when completing these projections.

This is an important projection for your school district because these numbers will populate the attendance counts that form your payments under the foundation school program for the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school years. If you estimate too low, you will be underpaid during the course of the school year and TEA will owe you money when they compute near final settle up in the September after the relevant school year. If you estimate too high, you will be overpaid during the course of the year and you will owe TEA when they compute near final settle up. Although you will always ultimately true up with final attendance counts, if these numbers are too far off, they can create cash-flow problems for your school district. The projection is also important because next biennium, it will form the basis of indicator 15 under your new FIRST ratings.

You can read TEA Correspondence about the projections here.

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Amanda Brownson

10-17-2018 09:01

Just to clarify, I confirmed with TEA staff that the way the FIRST calculation will work is that if you do not log on to the system and submit projections (either by accepting TEA's numbers or modifying them), you will get 0 points. If you do log on to the system and either accept TEA's projections or modify based on local data, they will test for variation from actual. If the TEA projection is outside the confidence interval, the district loses points, regardless of whether the basis of the estimate was local or TEA.

Amanda Brownson

10-15-2018 17:57

If they are close, that may be an okay strategy. But as the variance TEA allows on this indicator is fairly wide, and since the counts will govern your cash-flow, I would use local estimates if they differ much from TEA. They are presuming an estimate for 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 without knowing who has shown up yet in 2018-2019, so you should have more recent data locally. That said, it may be close enough that you are comfortable with the TEA numbers. I would pay careful attention to the special programs counts as for many districts, these have not been tracking overall enrollment change lately (especially special education and CTE).

Hope that helps some.

Amanda

DeAnna Clavell, CTSBO, MAFM

10-15-2018 11:27

I have a questions regarding the pupil projections. As a school District we do our best to anticipate our enrollment and ADA for a far into the future as we can for budget and planning purposes.

Under the new Indicator for the FIRST that will be applicable in 2021, TEA will be reviewing whether or not we are within the allotted range.

For example a District such as mine who is just over 2,000 students can be within 20% of the actual ADA.

But, then it asks or Did the district certify the numbers provided by TEA.

For a school District of our size, 20% is a 400 ADA variance, which seems like a significant variance.

Would it be in our best interest to Certify TEA projections VS Entering our own?

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