By Lorenzo Salinas

l.v.salinas@panews.com

 

Port Arthur Independent School District turned in its Snapshot numbers to the Texas Education Agency (TEA) Oct. 27.

It is information that every school district in the state turns in the last Friday of October. Snapshot information, which is also used for Public Education Information Management System (PEIMS), also helps determine the amount of state and local funding due to PAISD under Texas law because it tells the state how many students are enrolled for the semester.

After Harvey inundated parts of Southeast Texas with historical amounts of flooding, displacing thousands of residents, the numbers of students attending PAISD for the 2017-18 school year was expected to drop—and it did.

PAISD Director of Technology and PEIMS coordinator Anthony Jackson said October’s Snapshot had the district’s student enrollment at 2,041. It was roughly 600 students less than the district normally has. The Memorial High School campus accounted for nearly 100 of those students according to Jackson.

Under normal circumstances, such a decline in student enrollment would mean less state funding for the district; however, Harvey-affected areas such as Port Arthur are anything but normal.

Governor Greg Abbott said last month that part of Texas’ Economic Stabilization Fund, or “Rainy Day Fund,” would be used to help those public schools that lost students due to displacement and other storm-related factors.

This, in theory, would help account for some lost funding from the state. However, the details of that plan have yet to be finalized.

“I believe they’re still working on it,” Jackson said. “They still haven’t worked that out yet.”

In the meanwhile, districts across the state are undertaking special procedures to help account for the loss of student attendance.

Jackson said there is a special crisis coding for students affected by Harvey. For example, if a student left Port Arthur and was attending a school in Houston, that Houston school would have to code them specially due to their displacement by the storm.

Jackson said PAISD would not know if they would be penalized in terms of state funding until the summer.

PEIMS data, which Snapshot contributes to, is provided four times each school year by a district. It includes information like student demographic and academic performance, personnel, financial and organizational information.