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Next year’s property tax rate for the Alamo Colleges District will stay the same as this year: just under $0.15 per $100 of value. Because of a slight increase in property values, district officials said the average homeowner will pay $11 more next year.
The Alamo Colleges board of trustees approved the tax rate Tuesday evening.
“The board commitment to maintaining a stable tax rate has allowed us to maintain, renovate and construct facilities, as well as fund district operations, all without increasing the tax rate since 2013,” Associate Vice Chancellor Lisa Mazure told the board during a presentation about the tax rate in August.
The community college district’s combined property tax rate includes just under $0.11 per $100 of value for daily operations and slightly more than $.04 per $100 to pay back debt for construction and renovation projects.
Mazure said the $0.11 maintenance and operations tax covers about half of the district’s general budget. The Alamo Colleges also receives funding from the state, grants from the federal government, and tuition from students. A large portion of student tuition is also covered by state and federal funding through financial aid like Pell grants.
Academic Fresh Start
Trustees also approved a policy called Academic Fresh Start during Tuesday’s board meeting. It allows students to request courses be removed from the calculation of their GPA if they took the classes at least five years ago.
At a committee of the whole meeting last week, Vice Chancellor George Railey Jr. told trustees that the Fresh Start policy would help more students qualify for enrollment.
“This enhances the transferability of GPA improvement for students and helps improve opportunities for students to reach their academic student success,” Railey said.
Previously state law only allowed courses to be excluded if they were taken at least a decade before. A new state law allows colleges to make the change to five years instead.
Degree milestone
The Alamo Colleges also celebrated hitting a degree milestone Tuesday. Chancellor Mike Flores said the district had set a goal of awarding 12,000 degrees and certificates during the 2024-2025 school year but had instead awarded more than 14,000.
According to the slideshow presented to the board, Alamo Colleges awarded 14,015 degrees and certificates last school year. But Flores said that number had already increased since the board agenda was posted.
"This is dated because we have to legally post the agenda on Wednesday evening of last week, and so it's actually 14,063," Flores said. "14,063 graduates."
That’s nearly 3,400 more degrees than the community college system conferred to students the year before. According to district records, the Alamo Colleges awarded roughly 10,500 degrees and certificates every year between 2021 and 2024.
Flores credited the district’s ambitious goal setting, called WIG for Wildly Important Goal, for the achievement.
“We have utilized the WIG methodology for many years, and that's a wonderful protocol for us, to be able to focus and harness all of our resources, all of our individual (energy) and turn that into collective energy and intentionality,” Flores said.
