This is the fourth story in an ongoing, data-driven TPR series called Golden Pennies.
The flat, one-lane roads into Wink, Texas, are peppered with oil wells that slowly bob up and down.
In the town, the sleek and bright school campus stands out among modest homes. A small orange water tower sits off to the side, near a gas station and convenience store.
After four years without a state funding increase, many Texas school districts are struggling to make ends meet. But, as the bright lights of Wink’s new football stadium attest, Wink-Loving Independent School District isn’t feeling the pinch.
An obscure element of the school finance system called Golden Pennies leaves Wink-Loving and a handful of other Texas districts with far more money than they need.
Superintendent Scotty Carman grew up in Wink before going to college and moving away for his first teaching job. When a job opened up at his alma mater 15 years ago, he jumped at the chance to come back home.
“Most people have lived here for generations,” Carman said. “It's a great little town, but we are isolated. There's not a lot to do here. Everything seems to revolve around the school.”
Wink-Loving is a small school district in the Permian Basin with about 450 students in kindergarten through 12th grade.
The entire district fits on one modern campus in Wink. The elementary, junior high and high school all share the same cafeteria. Over the last several years, the district has completely rebuilt the campus with all new buildings, including a football stadium and state-of the-art athletic facilities.
“That's double gym. The other gym — competition gym. We have baseball, softball fields on the other side,” Carman said during a tour of the complex.
With one key card, he can unlock any door on campus. And there are other fancy security features too.
“You can see the windows kind of look a little different. They have the ballistic film on them,” he said, pointing to the lobby of the elementary school.
In mid-November, both the high school football and volleyball teams were gearing up for playoffs. A handmade poster in the elementary school cheered them on with the slogan, “Small town. Big Heart.”
Championship banners from years past hang from the ceiling of the combined junior and high school to memorialize the town’s pride in their Wink Wildcats.
In a second-grade classroom, students played a game to practice counting coins.
“We have these spinners, and we put a paperclip right here, and we put our pencil like this, and we spin it,” one student explained. “Whatever we get on, like, say, I got a quarter. I would get to move [25 places].”
For the game, they’re using pictures of coins printed on paper. But their school district raked in some very real coin last year — $50,000 for each kid in class.
That’s five times the amount available for the average Texas public school student, according to a TPR analysis of state data.
For anyone familiar with the Texas school finance system — as explained in the other stories in this series — they may wonder how that’s possible, especially since Texas has recapture, often called Robin Hood.
State lawmakers created recapture 30 years ago to level the playing field between property-poor and property-rich school districts.
So, three decades later, why does Wink-Loving ISD have so much money? The answer is something called Golden Pennies.
The school district, like many districts in the Permian Basin, has a lot of property wealth. The oil wells near Wink are a visible sign of the added value oil and gas leases give the land in parts of West Texas.
Because of that extreme property wealth, Wink-Loving paid the state $150 million in recapture last year. And that would have been the end of it — if not for Golden Pennies. The process enables school districts to add additional pennies to their tax rate that aren’t subject to recapture.
Eight cents of Wink-Loving ISD’s tax rate is protected. The state can’t take any of the tax revenue generated by those eight Golden Pennies. And that adds up to a lot of money for Wink-Loving.
The state legislature added Golden Pennies to the Texas school finance system in 2006, after property-wealthy school districts sued. And, from the beginning, critics sounded the alarm. A legislative analysis from when lawmakers were debating them included arguments for and against the idea.
Opponents said Golden Pennies “would give a huge windfall of new money to property-wealthy districts that already are funded at the highest levels.”
But supporters disagreed. They said it was “unlikely that eliminating the recapture of local enrichment funds would generate extreme funding disparities.”
However, a drive through West Texas today suggests the opponents’ words were almost prophetic.
County Road 300 in Loving County bustles with tanker trucks carrying oil. Mostly undeveloped land stretches as far as the eye can see, interrupted only by power lines and fences to private roads leading to oil fields, processing plants, and temporary housing stations.
Part of the reason Wink-Loving’s Golden Pennies go so far is because the district’s boundaries include half of Winkler County plus all of Loving County.
Loving is the least populous county in the U.S. and one of the state’s top oil and gas producing areas. That means Wink-Loving ISD has very few students compared to the amount of property wealth inside its boundaries.
In fact, Carman said he could run his entire school district on just Golden Penny money. This year, Wink-Loving collected $18 million of it.
“We can run our district on $11 [million],” he said. “We could set our tax rate at $0.16 and be fine,” he added. “But the state is not going to like that because they're not going to get their big chunk of recapture.”
Even with the new property tax cuts, Wink-Loving expects to pay $136 million in recapture this year.
Several other Permian Basin districts have two to four times the average funding per student thanks to Golden Pennies, but other districts in the region aren’t as lucky.
Kermit ISD, just 15 minutes north of Wink, actually has less money than the average public school district in Texas. And like many districts in Texas — and across the country — with less funding, Kermit ISD serves mostly students of color and kids from low-income families.
Carman said if he led any other school district, he’d be upset by how much more money Golden Pennies flood into certain districts.
“It's not fair. But we didn't make the rules. We're just playing within the system,” Carman said. “If you take any superintendent and you put them in my seat here, they're going to do the exact same thing.”
He said the state’s the one that created the inequity, and Texas lawmakers are the ones who could solve it.
“The state needs to put in more of their share,” Carman said. “They're not paying enough right now, and it's all dependent on property taxes.”
But, in the meantime, Carman said he’s putting most of Wink-Loving’s Golden Penny money in the bank so that his district won’t be reliant on the state if — or when — the oil and gas industry goes bust and property values fall.
