For years, Texas AFT and our union’s members have been the lone voice at the Capitol fighting for pay raises for support staff, the indispensable employees who keep our schools running: paraprofessionals, bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria workers, and more. In 2025, that persistent advocacy paid off with a historic victory: the creation of the Support Staff Retention Allotment (SSRA) in House Bill 2 (HB 2).
This win wasn’t delivered from above by lawmakers. It was secured because our members organized, testified, lobbied, and refused to be ignored.
Members Lead the Charge: Grassroots Advocacy Crucial for Local Implementation of HB 2
As you read about in the Hotline earlier this month, Texas AFT members are now bringing that same grassroots spirit to local raise campaigns and winning victories across the state. Already this year, member activists in Dallas, Judson, Hidalgo, and Cy-Fair ISDs have organized at school board meetings, met with trustees, and fought hard to ensure that the SSRA funding actually flows to the employees who need it most. And they’ve won — in several cases pushing districts to increase support staff raises beyond their initial proposals.
But a new Texas AFT analysis reveals that the effectiveness of the SSRA, despite its promise, is at risk due to design flaws and insufficient funding. We must work together to make sure the SSRA funding does not get lost in district budgets or diverted to raises for “professional” staff, but instead goes directly to the workers it was designed for.
Further, given the limited SSRA funding available to them, district leadership must be educated and helped to understand that SSRA funding represents a floor – not a ceiling – for the amount they should invest in support staff raises.
What does SSRA mean for support staff raises?
“What should we be asking for? What do we need to be on the watch for? What do our elected officials need to know?”
While the concept of a dedicated revenue stream that must be spent on support staff raises is aligned with the real solutions that Texas AFT’s members have been pushing for years, a new analysis of Texas Education Agency (TEA) data has revealed potential pitfalls in the SSRA due to design problems, underinvestment, and potential violation of the spirit of the SSRA and misuse by school districts and charters.
Texas AFT explored these relatively simple questions to help inform our members’ local demands:
- How large would the raises that Texas school districts provide to their support staff be if each district spent 100% of its SSRA funding for the purpose?
- Does the formula for calculating SSRA funding treat public school districts and charter schools equitably, or is there a charter funding advantage like we see elsewhere in the school finance formula?
In school districts where Texas AFT has a chartered local union or organizing committee, the highlights of our findings are as follows:
- The highest maximum estimated raise per full-time support staff member would be $1,415 (a raise of 4.9%) in DeSoto ISD, and the lowest would be $561 (a raise of 1.9%) in Aldine ISD for the 2025-2026 school year.
- Texas AFT has pushed for an across-the-board 15% raise for support staff in the past because that is the level of investment needed for some of our lowest-paid workers. Even in the districts receiving the most SSRA funding, though, this dedicated revenue stream is insufficient for providing support staff with the raises they need.
- For comparison’s sake, the state funded the Teacher Retention Allotment (TRA) at the levels of $2,500 for teachers with 4-6 years of experience and $5,000 for teachers with 7+ years of experience in Aldine ISD and DeSoto ISD.
Are you interested in seeing the numbers for your school district or comparing your district to the rest of the state? Click here to download a one-pager customized with your local data or to view a spreadsheet of the statewide results.
Despite its intended purpose, the SSRA falls short of providing sufficient dedicated revenue for the substantial raises that support staff deserve after many years of wage stagnation and benefits erosion.
Furthermore, the Legislature defined the eligibility criteria for raises funded by the SSRA so broadly as to include school employees whose raises used to be covered by the basic allotment increase raise mechanism and who were left out of the comparatively well-funded Teacher Retention Allotment (TRA), including teachers with 0-3 years of experience, nurses, school counselors, and librarians.
These school employees are numerous and their salaries are already relatively high compared to support staff salaries. So, if a district decides to use its SSRA funding to provide even modest raises for “professional” staff, in whole or in part, those raises will wipe out much of a district’s SSRA funding.
Design Flaws in the SSRA & How to Fix Them
Eligibility Criteria Too Expansive
Texas AFT is deeply concerned that school districts may use this modest revenue stream to provide raises for “professional” staff who also deserve a raise, but for whom the SSRA was not designed. Texas continues to suffer from an educator recruitment and retention crisis as manifested in high rates of teacher turnover, beginning teachers, and uncertified teachers in our classrooms.
Many Texas school districts have already attempted to spend their way out of the crisis amid fierce competition with their neighboring districts. While Texas ranked 29th in the nation for teacher pay overall in the 2024-2025 school year, the state ranked 18th in the nation for starting teacher pay. By Dallas ISD’s own reporting to TEA, for example, the district provided teachers with 0-5 years an average salary increase of $2,694 after the passage of HB 3 in 2019 while teachers with 5+ years of experience received an average salary increase of $2,014, a difference of $679.
Charter Funding Advantage
On top of the insufficient funding and expansive eligibility criteria mitigating the potential benefit that support staff might receive from the SSRA, charters are receiving yet another unfair funding advantage resulting from the method that TEA uses for calculating attendance in the SSRA formula (recall that the SSRA is provided at a rate of $45 per student).
In fact, each public school district or charter school that receives any Small and Mid-Size Allotment enjoys an artificial SSRA funding boost.
However, public school districts only receive the Small and Mid-Size Allotment if their attendance is fewer than 5,000 students. Charter schools, on the other hand, receive a weighted average of the Small and Mid-Size Allotment regardless of their size.
What does this mean for our public school districts? Despite having a statewide enrollment of 79,430 in the 2024-2025 school year, IDEA Charter School campuses down the street from high-performing public school campuses are having their attendance artificially inflated by 15.5% compared to nearby public school campuses and receiving an additional $45 for each one of those imaginary students.
IDEA Charter Schools alone is projected to receive an additional $45 for 12,684 imaginary students in the 2025-2026 school year, for a total of an additional $570,766 from the SSRA charter funding advantage. This bonus SSRA funding is more than the total SSRA funding Bastrop ISD is projected to receive ($503,321 for 11,185 students). In fact, despite having a 14.8% smaller attendance than Northside ISD (80,917 vs. 68,967 students), IDEA is projected to receive more total SSRA funding ($3,674,277 vs. $3,641,257).
Prior to HB 2, charter schools already benefited from a funding advantage under state law. While the charter funding advantage under the new school finance system has yet to be quantified, charters will receive hundreds of millions in additional funding through the new school finance system via revenue streams unavailable to public school districts.
The SSRA’s contribution to this charter funding advantage and the significant additional funds directed to large charter operators with histories of malfeasance and corruption are further evidence for the need to impose an enrollment cap on charters receiving the Small and Mid-Size Allotment. Public school districts only receive Small and Mid-Size Allotment funding if they have an attendance of fewer than 5,000 students, and the same threshold should apply to charter networks.
This common-sense reform would curb the charter funding advantage and ensure that our precious and scarce state funding is directed to the small and mid-size districts and charters that genuinely require additional support due to their inability to operate under economies of scale.
Looking Ahead
While Texas AFT is strongly supportive of the concept of a dedicated revenue stream for permanent support staff raises, we urge the Texas Legislature to investigate how districts allocate SSRA funds in the 2025-2026 school year. In the next legislative session, lawmakers should increase SSRA funding and more precisely tailor the eligibility criteria to ensure that the school employees who need it the most receive the fair raises they deserve.
Your union remains committed to providing the data and insights our members need to run effective, data-driven campaigns in their own districts. Please contact our data and advocacy team at info@texasaft.org if you have any questions about this analysis or need additional support for your local campaign.