Costs for underfunded programs to transfer largely to Alliance ISD in split, email shows
Costs for bilingual and special education would largely be concentrated in the new district to the west of the Denton Highway in the event of a split of Keller ISD, according to an email received through an open records request.
Sent on Dec. 19 at 2:12 p.m., the email is from Josh Haney, vice president of finance at the Austin-based school finance consultancy Moak Casey. In it, he also noted that it is common that districts are “upside down” when it comes to special education because “they don’t get adequate revenues to cover necessary expenditures.”
After showing that he adjusted his analysis to demonstrate that he moved bilingual and special education revenues to what proponents have called Alliance ISD, Haney said that fewer of those students would mean that “less staff and resources will be needed” in the new Keller ISD.
Bilingual education has also been hit particularly hard by funding shortages faced by districts across the state, according to Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research.
The recipients of the email were redacted, but Haney told the Star-Telegram they were Superintendent Tracy Johnson, board President Charles Randklev and Trustee Micah Young.
Young is the board member who requested the report from Moak Casey, Haney said in his email to the Star-Telegram on Friday, Feb. 7.
Johnson and the members of the school board did not respond to requests for comment. The board delayed a vote on accepting Johnson’s resignation at the Jan. 30 meeting, but it did appoint Cory Wilson as interim superintendent. Wilson was the assistant superintendent of educational services.
Haney told the recipients of his Dec. 19 email that he had moved all of the allotment for bilingual students from the new Keller ISD to Alliance ISD “as new KISD campuses did not have any ‘Bilingual’ students on” the Texas Education Agency’s Student Program and Special Populations Reports for the 2023-2024 school year.
He also adjusted the number of special education students his analysis found would be in each district.
“The split of special education counts was reduced from 30% new KISD – 70% AISD to 24% – 76%,” Haney wrote in his Dec. 19 email. “This was in-line with special education enrollment figures on the report linked above.”
“This moved more revenues from new KISD into AISD compared to my previous projection,” Haney wrote. “As I mentioned on our call, I don’t believe this would necessarily have a major impact net of expenditures. With fewer students qualifying for these programs, less staff and other resources will be needed. Additionally, with special education in particular, usually districts are upside down (i.e. they don’t get adequate revenues to cover necessary expenditures).”
Board Secretary Joni Shaw Smith has opposed the split ever since she was “blindsided” by the proposal when she heard it discussed in the closed session at the Dec. 19 meeting.
“It’s clearly evident that conversations were had prior to the 19th in regards to this,” she said in a phone interview to discuss Haney’s email. “They are making the numbers fit their narrative to ensure that the new the smaller Keller district is successful while pawning off the expenditures in students of need to the Alliance district.”
Haney presented the Moak Casey report to trustees and the public at the Jan. 30 school board meeting. He told trustees that he had not looked at projected expenditures in his report, only revenues.
Smith mentioned several expenditures that could factor into a financial analysis, including utilities, health care and nutrition services that could be affected by renegotiation of contracts and inflation.
“So that doesn’t seem like a very smart thing to do,” she said, referring to leaving expenditures out of the financial report.
“I can’t really weigh in on, from an expenditure point, what the impact would be,” he said.
When Trustee Chelsea Kelly asked why expenditures were not included in the report, Haney said they were not included in the board’s request to create the report.
“That’s our firm’s expertise,” he told Kelly, referring to revenues. “In particular, my area of expertise is state revenues, so I assume they made that request to me just as a result of that.”
Haney said in his email to the Star-Telegram that he did not recall the mentions of expenditures in his Dec. 19 email.
“There may have been some general observations shared, but we did not conduct any actual analysis of how expenditures might be impacted from a split,” he said, adding that “there was no quantitative analysis done on the expenditure side, like there was on the revenue side. The request of us was to provide an objective, quantitative analysis where we could, and that could not be done on the expenditure side at the time.”
When asked by Smith on Jan. 30 when the request to analyze a split was made, Haney responded, “That request came from the board. The exact timing of that, I’d have to — I don’t have the timeline on that.”
The Keller school board first discussed the proposal during executive session at the Dec. 19 board meeting. Haney sent his email at 2:12 p.m. on that day. It included a detailed analysis of 2023-2024 revenues broken down along the proposed boundaries of the new districts.
The discussion of the split on Dec. 19 in executive session without posting an item of such special interest to the public on the agenda was a likely violation of the Texas Open Meetings Act, according to lawyers specializing in the legislation.
The board has since been more transparent with its meeting agendas, listing which issues were to be discussed in the executive session for two meetings in January.
Haney would not say when Young made the request to Moak Casey for the report, saying he would defer the question to Young.
Young did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
This story was originally published February 7, 2025 at 2:06 PM.
