Report card reality: Abilene ISD’s TEA C-Rating & financial hurdles explained

ABILENE, Texas (KTAB/KRBC) – Abilene ISD School Board Trustee Blair Schroeder says the district is making strides both academically and financially, even as hot-button topics like Bible-based curriculum have sparked political debate. From addressing a multimillion-dollar budget deficit to raising student performance, Schroeder says progress is happening, and the board has set ambitious goals for the years ahead.

Schroeder said the conversation surrounding bible-based curriculum became hyper-politicized, and when he looked, he only found about 26 references in more than 500 pages of curriculum.

“The bottom line is our teachers need tools to be able to teach our kids in a way that has meaning and impact consistent with our values,” Schroeder shared. “A lot of these were stories like the Good Samaritan, which I think is a great Bible story, one that we’ve taught in our home, but it also transcends just scripture. There are good Samaritan laws in every state in America, and so it’s a common term that’s used. There are also references to things that were outside of the Bible if you’re looking at other elements of faith. So this was something that was widely supported. It became politicized.”

He joined the school board when the district had more than $12.9 million budget deficit; Now, Schroeder is happy to report tremendous progress.

“It does not take rocket science to understand that whenever you have an issue like that, you’ve either got to create more revenue or you’ve got to make cuts, and in some cases, you’ve got to do both, while at the same time, we’ve got to improve our educational outcomes,” Schroeder said. “We’re now down to around three and a half million dollar budget deficit, cutting just shy of around $9 million, almost 10, if you really start sharpening the pencil, in one year.”

In an effort to further correct that deficit, AISD is asking for a VATRE, a Voter Approval Tax Ratification Election.

“Essentially, think of it like this is there has been a fund that has been created that taxpayers pay into when they pay their taxes to Austin and each school, if each district, if gets approved by the voters, then they basically get a it’s like a matching. I’m going to call it like a grant, although I know it’s not technically a grant… What would happen, essentially, is that each district was given a certain number of golden pennies that they could use and a certain number of copper pennies that they could use once approved. So AISD has not leveraged the full arsenal of the golden and copper pennies at its disposal,” Schroeder explained.

The 2025 TEA Ratings were recently released, showing great progress within AISD, but also some areas for improvement. The board previously worked to create a North Star Goal: to have more than 75% of students sitting in an A or B-rated campus by 2028, and Schroeder says they are well on their way.

“When I came on board, we only had 6% of our students in an A or B-rated school. That’s not a good number, and that definitely plays into the reputation of AISD lagging in performance. The reality is, we’ve made very strategic changes across how we’re approaching our educational product,” Schroeder said. “We’ve tightened our belts financially and academically to be able to make sure that we’re putting investment where it needs to go. We’ve updated our curriculum that we’re having in our classrooms. We’re spending more time on instruction, and we made some changes downtown that I think are positioning us for success, and in light of that, we’re already starting to see results. So we’ve seen in one year, our initial goal was maybe we can try to get it to 20% by year one, we’re at 34% of our students are at A or B schools, so that’s more than three fold where we were this time last year, and we are going to get to that goal by 2028.”