Parent Michelle Smith remembers exactly how she felt when Northwest ISD eliminated more than 100 teaching positions and increased class sizes to close a $16 million budget shortfall.
“Devastated,” she said. “It directly affected my children.”
Less than a year later, Northwest voters approved a 3-cent tax-rate increase, allowing district leaders to roll some of those changes back.
The voter-approved rate will help the district reduce class sizes, restore middle school fine arts staffing and set aside about $4 million for employee compensation. But some program changes and service models will remain, even as district officials say they feel more stable heading into the next budget cycle.
“The biggest change: It’s going to be our class sizes,” said Jonathan Pastusek, the district’s chief financial officer.
Class sizes start to get smaller
Not even a year ago, Northwest ISD increased second-, third- and fourth-grade class sizes to 24 students per teacher. State law caps elementary class sizes at 22 students per teacher in kindergarten through fourth grade, though districts can seek waivers from the Texas Education Agency to exceed that limit.
At middle and high schools, the district shifted from an expectation that teachers would see 165 students a day across seven periods to 180.
The goal now is to move “at least halfway back” toward previous staffing levels, Pastusek said, with elementary grades gaining slightly more ground.
Those ratios are not a guarantee that every class will sit at 22 or 23 students, he said. This year, even after Northwest increased its elementary class sizes, fewer than a fifth of classes had more than 22 students, Pastusek said.
Families likely won’t see smaller classes until next school year, because the district doesn’t want to move students midyear or hire teachers in the middle of the spring. Administrators will spend February and March looking at campus-level enrollment projections and posting new positions.
Fine art staffing for middle school to be bolstered
Smith’s youngest child is in middle school orchestra and they witnessed how the staffing changes stretched those programs thin, she said.
“You’re already running with sixth through eighth graders that are learning how to play music and have attitudes the size of their instruments,” she added. “They can’t do one-on-one things with these students. They can’t get tutors to come in to help supplement. There’s a lot of talent, but they just don’t have the resources to help develop it.”
Middle schools will have a consistent fine arts staffing model again, Pastusek said. Each campus will have both a head and an assistant director for band and choir, rather than splitting staff across multiple campuses or relying on high school directors for support.
Beyond classroom and fine arts staffing, the district is also trying to restore some cut custodial positions, Pastusek said.
Some cuts will remain
Not every reduction or program change will reverse, Pastusek said.
He pointed to AVID, a college-readiness program the district has previously described as effective but expensive.
“It’s still pretty inefficient on the cost side, so I don’t see that coming back immediately,” Pastusek said.
Northwest also replaced an older reading recovery program last year with newer literacy approaches tied to the state’s Reading Academies — mandatory training for all kindergarten to third-grade teachers focused on phonics and evidence-based reading instruction. Those changes shifted who provides intervention and how students receive support.
Smith said she felt the strain of those adjustments as class sizes grew, especially for her eighth-grade daughter with dyslexia.
“They have 30 kids in a middle school class, full of dyslexic and special ed. And there’s one aide going around helping all those kids,” she said.
Smaller classes should relieve some of the pressure teachers, aides and students have faced this year, Pastusek said.
Revenue helps restore staffing, but won’t erase uncertainty
The 3-cent tax-rate increase is expected to generate roughly $12 million in new revenue, with about $8 million going toward restoring positions and lowering class sizes and about $4 million set aside for compensation. District leaders have not yet brought a specific pay proposal to trustees.
“We want to continue to be competitive compensation in our area,” Pastusek said. “So we have to make sure that we’re being competitive in all levels. We’re going to look across the board and if there’s certain areas we’re behind in, those may get a little bit more.”
The new revenue gives Northwest breathing room — at least for now, Pastusek said.
But he pointed to inflation, tax compression, homestead exemptions and the rollout of the state’s education savings account program as factors that could erode that stability. Those decisions are out of the district’s control and up to the Texas Legislature and legislators’ shifting priorities, Pastusek said.
Anthony Tosie, the district’s executive director of communications, said the tax election’s result doesn’t fix the broader state funding picture. The state’s per-student basic allotment has increased only once since 2019 — by $55 — despite rising costs, he noted.
“As much as we want to be optimistic for school funding going forward, we’re not seeing those signs at the state level,” he said.
As a parent, Smith said she saw the tax-rate election results as a sign of how far families were willing to go to support their schools.
“There is a strength in our community where people want to support public school,” she said.
But she’ll judge the vote’s success in hallways and classrooms — not in spreadsheets.
Matthew Sgroi is an education reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at matthew.sgroi@fortworthreport.org or @matthewsgroi1.
At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
