From the Texas Tribune:
Midland ISD will sue Texas officials over the state’s so-called Robin Hood funding system for public schools, a significant attempt at forcing lawmakers to revisit how they go about ensuring low-income campuses benefit from resources similar to those that wealthier campuses enjoy.
The West Texas school trustees voted unanimously Tuesday to proceed with a lawsuit against Education Commissioner Mike Morath and state leaders, arguing that funding restrictions imposed by the Legislature prohibit them from raising and spending money to meet the needs of their students.
“We can sit here on this stage, and we can complain about it,” Midland ISD Board President Josh Guinn said before the vote. But nothing changes, Guinn added, “until you have four people — elected school board members — in the state of Texas say, ‘Enough’s enough. You’re going to stop stealing our community’s money.’”
Guinn said in an interview that he expected the district to file the lawsuit by 5 p.m. Wednesday but could not yet confirm whether it occurred. Texas Education Agency officials declined to comment on Midland’s decision to sue.
Frustrations over funding include a decades-old state mandate known as recapture in which districts in wealthy communities relinquish excess dollars raised locally to districts that struggle to generate property tax revenue. Recapture has survived at least three legal challenges in the last 30 years — in 1995, 2005 and 2016, respectively.
Located in a community rich in oil and gas, Midland will pay the state more than $83 million for recapture this school year, according to the lawsuit draft. That represents 27% of the district's $313 million generated locally.
Property taxes make up the majority of public school funding, while state dollars generally fill remaining gaps along with some federal aid.
The Midland school trustees contend that recent changes to Texas’ education funding system, dating back to 2019, unfairly deprived local communities of decision-making power over how they tax residents, instead granting much of that authority to the education commissioner.
Rather than allowing local school boards to set taxes within a certain range determined by the state, districts do so at the rate decided by the commissioner or risk losing state funding, they argue. Meanwhile, state leaders imposed requirements on how districts spend money raised locally, which the Midland trustees say prevents them from addressing their particular needs. Local needs vary across Texas’ more than 1,200 districts, they note.
Texas’ recapture system, often called Robin Hood, was enacted in 1993 after underfunded schools — led by the predominantly Hispanic and low-income Edgewood district in San Antonio — sued the state over substantial disparities in resources between their children and those attending school in wealthier communities.
Back then, recapture mostly affected wealthy suburban and oil-rich districts. In 1994, 34 school districts redistributed funding through the system, according to the Texas School Coalition.
Now, hundreds of districts — including those in major urban communities with declining enrollment and high numbers of students in poverty — pay more in recapture because of their local economies' growth. The Austin school district — one of the largest in Texas — reported paying roughly $8.3 billion through recapture between 2000 and 2025.
Midland is among the top 10 districts in Texas sending money back to the state for recapture, according to education agency data.
Rather than using recapture as a tool for educational equity, the Midland trustees argue that state leaders use it in place of funding schools properly. They say recapture does not account for the fact that more than half of the district’s students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which the state and federal governments consider a measure of poverty.
“Property wealth is not educational wealth. You cannot teach a child with a mineral appraisal,” Midland ISD trustee Matt Friez said Tuesday. “You need a teacher standing in front of the child. The recapture formula sees the minerals beneath our feet and does not adequately see what it costs out here in Midland to hire and retain a great teacher above them.”
When the Texas Supreme Court found recapture constitutional in 2016, it noted that lawmakers still needed to make improvements to public school funding. More than two-thirds of districts had sued in that case.
School administrators have since argued that state leaders have not prioritized investments in traditional neighborhood campuses but instead pushed to grow charter schools and create a voucher program that allows families to use public funding for private or home schooling.
When lawmakers approved funding changes in recent years, they did so with more restrictions on how districts could spend the money, arguing that schools had not focused enough on improving student outcomes.
“They're setting the tax rate. We collect the taxes. We send it to the state,” Guinn, the Midland school board president, said Wednesday. “Then we get blamed as a local district and local board member for taxes being high. It's just a revolving door.”
It is unclear whether additional school districts will join Midland’s lawsuit.
The legal challenge from Midland, a community that reliably votes Republican, comes as top GOP state leaders such as Gov. Greg Abbott push to abolish school property taxes. Kevin O'Hanlon and Kara Belew will represent the West Texas district in the lawsuit, according to the draft filing.
O’Hanlon represented the Texas Attorney General’s Office in Edgewood v. Kirby — the landmark school finance case that led to the creation of recapture. Belew has served as statewide budget director for Abbott, as one of the Texas Education Agency’s top finance experts and as a senior policy adviser for the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation.
Disclosure: Texas Public Policy Foundation has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in The Texas Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.