Public Schools 2017: Texas Students Could Work As Janitors To Solve Budget Problems

Central Texas lawmakers are flirting with the idea of making public school students work as janitors to alleviate budget troubles in the Frisco Independent School District, reports indicate.

Municipal officials and local volunteers have created a list of suggestions to deal with a budget shortfall that occurred after the 60,000-student school district lost $30 million in state funding and local voters rejected a tax increase in August. Other ideas on the list include students taking the trash out of their classrooms to ease some of the time-consuming duties of the custodial staff.

There is also a proposal to charge a fee for participation in school-organized sports. If high school students were charged $200 and middle school students paid $100 to play on sports teams, the district would save $1.9 million. Another idea would add student fees to pay for classroom or club-related extracurricular activities such as field trips.

The Frisco Independent School District was planning to open two new elementary schools, a middle school and a high school for the 2017-18 school year, but those schools will remain closed to save the district roughly $15 million in operating and staffing costs. One of the ideas to avoid spending so much on employees is to recruit volunteers to replace positions like librarians, reports said Monday.

Superintendent Jeremy Lyon told the Dallas Morning News the proposals were created to “design a process that would bring the community together, to identify our priorities as a school district, to recognize the strengths and weaknesses that we have and to arrive and land on our feet with a balanced budget.”

But a representative of the district maintained the proposals were just suggestions, and the school board will vote on whether any of them will be implemented in April when the budget is approved.