By ALBERT VILLEGAS
Special to the NEWS
If the past 11 years are any indication, the San Benito Consolidated Independent School District’s enrollment will continue to fall next school year, with the number now at nearly 4,000 students, further affecting how state funds are distributed locally.
In the 2025-26 school year, San Benito CISD’s Average Daily Attendance (ADA) has been 7,587 students, with an 89 percent attendance rate. At the start of this school year, SBCISD had an Average Daily Membership (ADM) of 8,524 students.
Back in 2015, the average daily attendance was 11,018 students, which equaled its ADM, according to the SBCISD Finance Department. SBCISD had a 95.3% attendance rate, which was only matched the following year.
“Attendance versus Enrollment” was a graph introduced by the SBCISD’s Finance Department to the SBCISD Board of Trustees during a finance committee meeting inside the John F. Barron Administration Building on April 8.
Victoria Perez, SBCISD assistant superintendent of the Finance and Operations Department, provided a budget review and revenue presentation for the upcoming school year. “Attendance versus Enrollment” was only part of what trustees were told, but it revealed an alarming trend.
She wanted to make trustees aware of these attendance-versus-enrollment comparisons because of the challenges that school administrators and their staff across SBCISD face.
“This is always a struggle for schools; we prepare for every one of the students that we have, but not all of them are here, and that’s where we get (state funding) paid out of,” Perez said. “So, for the past 10 years, there has been a trend going downward.”
SBCISD, like all school districts in the state, has its funding affected by the ADM, which is the total number of days students are enrolled, whether present or absent, divided by the total number of school days.
School funding is also affected by the ADA, which is the total number of students in attendance divided by the number of instructional days in a school year.
All of these concerns were recently echoed publicly during an SBCISD Town Hall Meeting at Rangerville Elementary School. Leading up to the early-March event, school administrators provided trustees with hard facts showing that SBCISD was losing money by continuing to keep Rangerville operational because of its enrollment decline. SBCISD also saw a decline in staff.
Instead of closing the historic school, which operated in the 1930s under the Rangerville School District, it would remain open for the foreseeable future.
For the eighth consecutive year, SBCISD as a whole will have lower attendance and enrollment than the previous school year, according to the SBCISD Finance Department. In 2025, the average daily attendance was 7,876; in 2024, 7,957; and in 2023, 8,139.
In 2022, SBCISD’s attendance rate dropped to 89.6 percent, and over the past five years, it has never risen above that level.
Between 2015 and 2017, SBCISD had an Average Daily Attendance (ADA) of at least 10,600 students. Even then, the ADA dropped from 11,018 in 2015 to 10,621 two years later.
The school district’s ADA was 9,359 in 2018 and rose to 9,411 the following year.
As the current school year comes to a close, so does the current operating budget. In the summer, trustees will hold meetings and public hearings to introduce the 2026-27 operating budget, with financial figures presented by Perez’s finance team.
She told trustees at the meeting that she will move forward conservatively on the budget, but it’s a “slippery slope.”
“The fact that we have more revenues with fewer expenses is a very good thing because we’re going to have to see where those revenues are going to be affecting our current budget,” Perez said. “So, as we are working on next year’s budget, I really want it to be as conservative as possible.”
Regarding the next school year, Perez said the finance department projects 7,400 students in ADA and 8,275 in ADM, with an 88 percent attendance rate.
“We want to see an increase in enrollment, but if it doesn’t happen, we’ve over-planned for it,” Perez said. “Enrollment can go up and down; we can project it high, keep our budget high, and keep it balanced, or we can be realistic about what we really need to do with our budget.”
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