What these words mean.

Recapture

A Texas rule that takes local property-tax money from a district labeled “property-wealthy” and sends it to the state. Austin ISD’s adopted recapture for FY2025–26 is about $715.5 million. See the recapture bill.

Chapter 49

The section of the Texas Education Code that is recapture. It used to be called Chapter 41. Same machine, new number.

“Robin Hood”

Newspaper nickname for recapture: take from “rich” districts, give to “poor” ones. The legal test is taxable property value per student, not whether a child’s family is rich. Austin can pay recapture and still have nearly half of students classified economically disadvantaged.

Property-wealthy

TEA’s label for a district whose taxable land and buildings, divided by students, sit above a state wealth cap. It is a real-estate ratio. It is not a description of the children in the building.

Basic allotment

The state’s base dollar per student in the school-finance formula. Set at $6,160 in 2019. Extra funding for poverty, language, and disability is a multiplier on this number. When the base freezes, those extras freeze in real terms. See the allotment froze.

GYIA

Guaranteed Yield Increment Adjustment. House Bill 2’s $55 add-on for 2025–27. It is not an inflation index. Statutory basic allotment remains $6,160; with GYIA the working figure is $6,215.

TEA

Texas Education Agency. The state office that grades campuses A–F, can close a school or replace a board, and has to accept a failing campus’s turnaround paperwork.

A–F ratings

TEA’s letter grades for campuses and districts. An F is “Unacceptable.” Several F years in a row trigger state intervention. Letter grades measure a test-and-accountability clock. They do not measure whether a child still has a librarian or a neighborhood bus stop.

UA / consecutive failure

Unacceptable. A campus in a “UA chain” has failed TEA’s rating for consecutive years. After enough years the commissioner shall close the school or install a board of managers — a state takeover of the district.

TAP

Turnaround Plan. A document TEA requires for a campus that has failed its ratings. It can include extra staff, a restart, or closing the building and sending students elsewhere. In 2025–26 AISD tied TAPs to consolidations. Closure savings were estimated around $21 million; about $17 million was already committed to those turnaround costs.

Takeover / conservatorship / board of managers

State intervention. Conservatorship is one step below replacing the elected board. A board of managers is the commissioner putting state appointees in charge. AISD treated that risk as the reason to close schools and cut campus time on TEA’s calendar.

Utilization

How full a building is, as a percentage of seats. Staff aimed at about 85% from about 76%. Empty seats were compared to the Moody Center. Utilization counts rooms, not whether a child can get to school.

ADA

Average daily attendance. Texas pays on who shows up, not on who is enrolled. Cutting neighborhood bus stops can lower ADA and therefore lower state aid — the same formula the district says is in crisis.

Hubs

The 2026 transportation cut: secondary students lose neighborhood stops and meet the bus at an elementary campus instead. Scored as about $5.1 million saved. Lost attendance was not scored in the public materials this site cites.

Fund balance

Reserves — money already in the bank, not a new state dollar. The June 18 librarian amendment parks those jobs on fund balance until replacement cuts are named. That is a one-year hold, not a formula fix.

VATRE

Voter-approval tax-rate election. Austin’s 2024 Proposition A raised the maintenance-and-operations rate. In a recapture district, most of a local tax increase still leaves for the state. District materials: about $171 million extra levy, about $130 million recaptured, about $41 million net to AISD.

Rainy-day fund / ESF

Economic Stabilization Fund. Texas’s statewide reserve, filled mostly by oil and gas taxes. Balance $27.5 billion as of June 30, 2026 — already at the constitutional cap. Projected near $28.5 billion by the end of fiscal 2027 if the Legislature appropriates nothing more. Spending it takes a supermajority. This site treats that pile as an investment the state is not making in schools, water, and the grid — not as a one-time gift to “solve” a crisis. See the recapture bill.

Surplus / leftover GR

Money left in general revenue after a budget cycle. The Comptroller’s January 2025 estimate carried a $23.76 billion general-revenue-related leftover into 2026–27. The 2023 surplus was often cited at $32.7 billion. Together with the rainy-day fund, Texas has been sitting on the order of $30 billion while the basic allotment stayed frozen.

Band 1 / Band 3–4

AISD’s grouping of campuses by need and turnaround status. Band 1 (turnaround) kept smaller class-size ratios. Band 3–4 elementaries went to 24:1 in grades 2–4 and 27:1 in grade 5. Those rooms still have children.

Trustees / the board

AISD’s nine-member Board of Trustees. Elected, not appointed by staff: seven from geographic districts, two at-large, four-year unpaid terms. A vacancy may be filled by appointment until the next election. In law they hire the superintendent, adopt the budget, set the tax rate, and set policy — including which schools close. They are not teachers and not custodians. They are also not a party ticket. The 2025–26 record is the vote, often after silent campus nights. See AISD Board.

Item 14.3

The November 20, 2025 board vote on consolidations and program moves. It carried 6–3 after more than two hours of public “vote no.” Recapture, inflation, and the basic allotment do not appear in that voting file.

Campus nights / “the gym”

Local input meetings AISD held at the schools themselves in fall 2025, usually in the gym or cafeteria, where families came to speak about their campus. On this site, “the gym” means those nights — not a sports gym. Trustees, when they came, were often introduced and did not take questions. Comments were collected. The vote still sat on the downtown calendar.

The dais / the board table

The raised desk where trustees sit during a board meeting. “From the dais” means from that table, in public session — not from a campus gym.

Downtown / central offices

AISD’s central administration and the board’s downtown meetings — not “the City of Austin” in general. Campus nights collected comments. Decisions were spoken from here.

Meeting transcript / “captions”

AISD records its board meetings and campus nights on video. The on-screen text at the bottom of those videos — like television subtitles — is saved as a written transcript of who said what. Quotes on the meetings page come from that transcript. Some people call that text “captions.” Here it does not mean a photo caption. The automatic text sometimes garbles names.

The school day vs the report card

The school day is what a child actually gets: a known adult, planning time, a librarian, a neighborhood bus stop, dual language. The report card is what the state grades: A–F letters, how full a building is, TAP paperwork, TEA deadlines. Downtown can hit the report card and still seal a neighborhood’s school. Those are not the same job. (An older draft of this site called them “intrinsic” and “extrinsic.” Those words are dropped here because they hid the point.)

FTE

Full-time equivalent. 11.5 librarian FTE meant 23 small campuses would share a librarian — half-time at each — until the June 18 amendment put those jobs back, temporarily, on reserves.

Stipend

Extra pay for extra work, here bilingual and special-education stipends. The 2026 package cut them. The formula still counts those students as higher-need.

Planning time

The period a teacher has to prepare, grade, and meet families. The 2026 package converted some of that time into instructional positions (about 150). Less planning, more students in the room.

Economically disadvantaged

TEA’s poverty classification. 48.4% of AISD students. Compensatory education funding sits on the basic allotment, so a frozen base is a frozen extra for those students.

Lone Star Governance

A TEA-backed board monitoring routine. On some nights the dais moved from public comment into tracking a sixth-grade math goal. Process. Not a second budget option.

Figures on this page are the same ones cited on the numbered chapters. Verify them on sources.