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The Judson Independent School District is paying an outside consultant $1,500 a day to help the school board understand the budget and reduce the deficit.
That’s according to the consultant’s contract, obtained by TPR through an open records request.
The expense comes as the district grapples with one of the most urgent deficits in the San Antonio region.
Judson’s new board majority voted to hire the outside consultant on June 5 in a split 4-3 vote, against the wishes of the three trustees who were in the board majority prior to the May election.
The board majority also voted to give Board President Monica Ryan sole authority to select and hire the consultant, again against the wishes of the board minority, which wanted to make the choice as a full board.
Ann Dixon Board Consultant Agreement by Texas Public Radio on Scribd
Two days later, Ryan signed a contract with former Somerset ISD Superintendent Ann Dixon. It stipulated that Dixon was paid a daily rate of $1,500 plus expenses for up to 20 days of work with the district, with the option for the board president to approve more days as needed.
That daily rate comes out to about $400 more a day than Judson pays its superintendent.
Judson Superintendent Milton Fields’ contract gives him an annual salary of $265,000, which breaks down to about $1,100 a day — nearly $100,000 less than Dixon would be paid if she were salaried at the same rate as her consultant contract.
FieldsContract-thru2028 by Texas Public Radio on Scribd
Despite the disparity in pay, Ryan told TPR she thinks Dixon is worth it because of how much she is helping the board cut from the budget.
“This is kind of one of those short-term fixer people, right? This is not someone you bring on permanently,” Ryan said. “This is someone who comes in, works 12 to 16 hour days, comes in, crashes, gets the data, gets the work, gets the project done as quickly as you can.”
By Ryan’s estimate, Dixon’s suggestions to the board on June 23 enabled them to save $4 million to $5 million.
“Just in the first six or seven days on that contract, she was able to bring, probably … $4 to $5 million in savings that we were able to get seven board members to agree to. One of them was a 6-1 vote, but at least the board majority. And that is just so much farther than we had come in the last year to be able to reduce our expenses,” Ryan said.
According to projections from district officials, Judson reduced budget expenditures by about $9 million between April and June, which means half of those savings would have been achieved prior to Dixon’s arrival.
Ryan said she wasn’t sure how many days total Dixon would work for Judson, because they still have to get through more rounds of cuts. But she said Dixon will have worked at least the initial 20 days by this week. That means Judson will soon have paid Dixon at least $30,000 plus expenses, with more days of work ahead.
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The three trustees who voted against hiring a consultant see it as an unnecessary expense that runs the risk of taking on duties that are supposed to be reserved for the superintendent.
“I think it's a bad look for us to suddenly spend money on the board in view of everything else,” said Trustee Laura Stanford when the topic was first discussed on May 21.
“It's almost like (Ryan) is hoping and dreaming that another consultant is going to come up with all the magic answers there. There's no magic answer. We are underfunded by Austin,” added José Macias.
Before the vote to hire a consultant, Judson Superintendent Milton Fields told trustees his team stood ready to work with whoever they hired. But, Fields said, his team already has budget experts in-house that can do the work too.
“If you ask me, ‘Do we need it,’ I'd say, ‘No, you guys need to talk to our subject matter expert. We have an individual who does this for a living,” Fields said June 5.
Ryan, however, disagreed.
“The data doesn't play that out, unfortunately. For a year, we've known this was coming, and we didn't reduce our expenses much at all,” Ryan said. “Everybody's up for a great steady state job, right? Where everything's going just normal, but this is just such a unique situation that it just requires somebody with a little more expertise. It's not something I would expect just a standard superintendent or CFO to have been trained on.”
Judson’s finance department has given trustees many presentations on options to cut the budget over the past few years, but the board only agreed to some of them.
Fields also pointed to that disconnect in June.
“I don't want to get into the history. I don't want to get into what I said versus what was done,” Fields said. “I do want to say, though, that we knew we would find ourselves in this situation. This should not be a shock to anybody who's been here for the last two years. We said we were going to be here, and now we're having to make the hard decisions.”
Ryan said an outside expert is needed because Judson is in a unique situation, including enrollment loss at the same time it is building new schools, and has three new trustees that need to learn how school finance works.
“Nobody wants to close schools, right? But when a board understands how that plays into the bigger financial picture, then you understand why you should vote in certain ways, and certain things have to happen just for the financial solvency of the district for the future,” Ryan said. “And I think that's where a third-party person providing that objective viewpoint of that [is helpful] because she's got no skin in the game.”
Just after the May elections Ryan and the three new trustees voted to consider closing three schools. After facing an outcry from a community upset by the sudden news and rapid pace, they reversed course less than a week later.
Judson used an unusual stop-gap called disaster pennies last year to help reduce the budget deficit, but access to those additional funds was only good for one year without voter approval. District administrators and members of the board minority want to ask voters to make that increased funding level permanent in the fall.
