05 · The recapture bill
Follow the local tax dollar until it leaves, then see what the campus kept.
Recapture is Chapter 49 of the Education Code. AISD’s own pages say the district is property-rich and that hundreds of millions of local levy go back to the state each year. Selling buildings and parking librarian pay on fund balance closed a single year. They did not fund the school day students still needed.
Two enrollment counts appear in official sources. Both are labeled here. Recapture is computed on attendance wealth, so a falling student count can raise wealth per student even when family income does not. AISD’s recapture page, on the FY2024–25 adopted general-fund dollar: 46.3 cents of that dollar was the recapture payment — sent to the state. The rest is what this district had left to run schools. That is not a nickname for a child. It is the split on AISD’s own recapture page.
Recapture and enrollment, AISD tables
FY2026 adopted series from AISD’s 2026 Budget Process page. FY2014–15 opening point from the Recapture page ($181,118,956 at 84,191 students) — the year AISD uses when it says recapture grew “nearly 400 percent.”
Adopted recapture (millions)
Drawn in the browser from data/aisd.json. If the chart is empty, JavaScript is off; the table below still holds.
| Year on AISD table | Recapture | Enrollment |
|---|---|---|
| 2014–15 (Recapture page) | $181,118,956 | 84,191 |
| 2016 | $266,073,630 | 83,270 |
| 2017 | $403,324,244 | 82,766 |
| 2018 | $540,290,792 | 81,346 |
| 2019 | $665,251,676 | 79,787 |
| 2020 | $639,599,384 | 80,911 |
| 2021 | $706,687,156 | 74,982 |
| 2022 | $762,800,496 | 74,602 |
| 2023 | $900,910,768 | 73,384 |
| 2024 | $664,839,391 | 73,681 |
| 2025 | $777,158,149 | 72,272 |
| 2026 adopted | $715,523,373 | 72,303 |
AISD’s Recapture page lists FY2021–22 as $765,741,768 and FY2024–25 adopted as $821,055,366. The Budget Process table (used above for 2016–2026) lists $762,800,496 and $777,158,149. The 2025 ACFR reports $771.60 million Chapter 49 expense for the year ended June 30, 2025. Both official figures are shown. Recapture page · Budget Process.
Largest-payer fact, from AISD: in FY2023–24 the district remitted $467.8 million more than the second-place district (Pecos-Barstow-Toyah) and more than the next five combined. Independent write-ups of 2024–25 put AISD near a quarter of statewide recapture. “Property wealthy” is a ratio. It is not a description of the children in the building.
VATRE, the rainy-day fund, and a surplus parked
Austin voters approved a 2024 maintenance-and-operations tax-rate election (Proposition A). District materials described about $171 million in additional levy, of which about $130 million was estimated to recapture and about $41 million net to AISD — including a compensation adjustment. Raising local taxes in a Chapter 49 district is a leaky bucket by design.
The state’s own piggy bank is not empty. The Economic Stabilization Fund — the rainy-day fund — held $27.5 billion as of June 30, 2026. It has already hit the constitutional cap (about $26.9 billion for this biennium), so the Comptroller had to shrink the oil-and-gas transfer that would have gone in. The Certification Revenue Estimate still projects about $28.5 billion by the end of fiscal 2027 if the Legislature takes nothing more out. On top of that pile, the January 2025 Biennial Revenue Estimate carried a $23.76 billion general-revenue-related leftover into 2026–27. People round the parked money to about $30 billion. The 2023 surplus was often cited at $32.7 billion. Either way, Texas is storing tens of billions while the school formula sits at $6,215.
That money is not a gift to “solve” Austin’s crisis and then move on. Schools, water, roads, and the power grid are things Texas already owns and will still need next year. Children are not a flood. Using a capped rainy-day fund to unfreeze the allotment and rebuild that infrastructure is an investment in the people who will still live here. AISD’s $181 million operating hole, closed on campuses, is a rounding error next to that pile. Recapture still took $715.5 million from this district this year. See the frozen allotment.
Same levy, different lines
Compensation figures are from the superintendent’s board-approved contract and TEA salary files. The librarian restoration was scored at under $1 million. Those lines belong in the same view as class size.
| Line | Amount | Record |
|---|---|---|
| Superintendent base | $362,250 / yr | Contract §3.1, Feb. 2024–Aug. 2028, auto-raises on admin scale. BoardDocs PDF |
| Supplemental retirement | $36,750 / yr | Employer-paid, contract §3.6 |
| Business travel | Reimbursed (airfare, hotel, meals, rental car). No car allowance or lease in this contract. | Contract §3.3. The 2026 extension redline keeps the same travel language. |
| Agreed-order payment | $25,000 | 2024 contract §3.14: lump sum when TEA lifts the special-education agreed-order sanctions. Statesman, July 2026: paid as an extra-duty stipend. |
| A–F ratings pay | $1,500 per campus | 2026 contract §3.14: for each campus that was D or F when the extension was signed and later prints at least a C. First cycle: ratings due December 2026. If the state does not release ratings, the board can still decide he qualifies. Those letters sit on STAAR. The contract does not call this a “STAAR bonus.” That is what it pays for. |
| Average teacher base (2025) | $63,367 | New: $54,565; 6+ years: $67,722. Tribune / TEA |
| Proposed librarian reduction | ~$897k–$977,500 | 11.5 FTE / 23 campuses. Not executed. Funded from fund balance pending August replacement cuts. |
| Board of trustees | $0 salary | Nine elected seats (seven single-member districts, two at-large), four-year terms. Unpaid. Vacancies may be appointed until the next election. Job: hire the superintendent, adopt the budget, set the tax rate, set policy. AISD Board |
These lines are public. They belong in the same year the district sells land and cuts campus time. Recapture is the state’s share of local levy. It does not require treating campus adults as expendable. The contract does not pay a car allowance or a lease. It reimburses trips, and a rental car is on that list. It does not say the superintendent cannot afford a car on $362,250. He is not teaching these children. They would not know his face, because he is not on campus. Paying that office $1,500 for each D or F campus that later prints a C is paying for a letter on kids he does not teach. Last year’s Wooldridge staff still moved an F to a B in the building. See Congratulations, Wooldridge.
Trustees are not appointed by downtown staff. Voters elect them. They are unpaid. The law gives them the budget, the superintendent contract, the tax rate, and the closure vote. Some put in long unpaid hours; that does not make them teachers, and it does not make them automatically “rich people who like to decide.” Who can afford to run still tracks time and money. In 2025–26 the record is they often sat silent at campus nights and voted a plan already on the calendar. A school can still open if they do not walk the halls. It cannot if the custodians do not: unclean halls are a sanitation and safety problem, not a figure of speech.
A $977,500 librarian restoration from reserves is a real decision. It is also smaller than one superintendent compensation package (base plus supplemental retirement) and smaller than a rounding error on recapture. That comparison is arithmetic. It does not replace Chapter 49 reform. It shows why the June vote could not restore a funded school day.
The superintendent led operations, facilities, and construction before the 2024 contract. The 2026–27 plan counts on the order of $60 million from selling or monetizing district property. Those two facts belong in the same public packet as class size: is land being used as operating revenue while the classroom is told to wait? Sources: contract PDF; AISD June 2026 budget letter; KUT / Chronicle on property sales.