High School Stadiums, Packed With Loopholes

Texas isn’t a place you’d expect to see the words “equalized wealth,” but there they are in the state’s education code. The so-called Robin Hood provision passed in 1993 requires that school districts with taxable property values above a certain level, currently $319,500 per student, surrender some of their revenue to poorer communities. For the 2012-13 school year, a record 374 of Texas’s 1,030 districts are giving up a total of about $1 billion. (In 1993, 35 districts made the list.) Tax money used to repay bondholders is exempt from redistribution, so as the number of towns deemed property-rich has grown, many have raised millions from bond issues to build lavish football stadiums and schools. Nearly 100 high school stadiums have opened in Texas in the last five years. “If you don’t pass a bond and spend it here for your kids, the money just goes to the state,” says Dustin Burns, president of the booster club at Carthage High School, near the Louisiana border.

Voters in some districts have balked at issuing bonds to cover costly new facilities, but school bonds are generally an easy sell in Texas, where a state guarantee prevents default. In the last four elections with bond initiatives on the ballot, voters in two-thirds of 174 districts approved borrowing a total of $5 billion, according to data from the education news site TexasISD.com. Carthage district voters have passed three bond issues totaling $50.5 million in four years, mostly for schools, Superintendent Glenn Hambrick says. The Carthage Bulldogs play in a four-year-old stadium upgraded this year with a $750,000 video scoreboard stretching 1,200 square feet. The scoreboard, a standalone ballot item, won with 69 percent approval in May. Carthage has a schools budget of $23 million this year and surrenders an additional $11 million for redistribution. Carthage High serves 750 students.