Nineteen Texas school districts serving 60,697 students were rated “substandard achievement” on the state’s annual financial report card this year, and ten of them let the deadline to challenge that rating pass without filing anything, according to the Texas Education Agency’s public ratings database, checked Sept. 8.
The deadline is Sept. 8. In a letter to superintendents issued Aug. 6, the agency’s financial compliance division wrote that “for the appeal to be considered, TEA must receive it on or before September 8, 2026,” and that “if no appeal is submitted by your school system, your school system’s preliminary rating becomes final on the 31st day after the preliminary ratings are released (September 9, 2026).”
The rating system, which the agency calls FIRST — short for the Financial Integrity Rating System of Texas — scores every district each year on how it handles its money: whether it filed its financial report on time, whether its debt and reserves are in line, whether its audit came back clean. A district that fails does not lose funding. But under state rule it must, within two months of the final rating, publish a newspaper notice and hold a public meeting to hand out a financial management report explaining itself to its own community. The notice must run no more than 30 days and no fewer than 10 days before that meeting.
That is the consequence now attaching to ten districts that did not contest the finding: Skidmore-Tynan, Bartlett, Damon, DeSoto, Hawley, Bay City, Veribest, Lyford, Raymondville and Crystal City. Nine others filed appeals and are listed in the database as under review: Point Isabel, Crane, Hitchcock, Memphis, Pharr-San Juan-Alamo, Fort Davis, McGregor, Tuloso-Midway and Kennedale. Pharr-San Juan-Alamo, in the Rio Grande Valley, is the largest of the nineteen.
The wider picture is a shift downward. Of 1,018 districts covering 5,106,711 students, 830 earned an A, or “superior achievement” — 81.53 percent, and down from 866 the year before, a drop of 36 districts. One hundred eleven were rated B, 58 were rated C, and 19 failed, up from 18 last year. Those aggregate figures carry a “last updated” stamp of Aug. 11 on the agency’s own summary page; the district-by-district appeal flags update in real time.
This year’s ratings are the first run through a rebuilt appeal process, which the agency now handles inside its own secure login system rather than by correspondence. The agency also narrowed what it will look at, telling superintendents it “will consider only an appeal that would result in a change to your school system’s rating” — in plain terms, a district cannot use the appeal to argue about an indicator that would leave its letter grade where it is.
Thirty-five districts statewide have appeals pending, which means most of the challenges are coming from districts that did not fail. Several A-rated districts filed, among them McAllen, Perryton, Giddings, Dalhart and Denver City, along with United ISD in Laredo, which was rated C. A district that already holds the top grade has no letter to protect, which suggests the disputes there are over individual indicators rather than the overall result.
The ratings released this summer are built on the 2024-25 fiscal year, the last full year before districts absorbed the funding changes the Legislature passed in 2025. The Texas Dispatch reported last week on Austin ISD’s decision to borrow $140 million against future tax collections to cover an $86 million shortfall — a different measure of strain, on a district the financial rating system scored well.
The agency has said it anticipates releasing final ratings, including the results of every appeal, in November 2026. Until then, the ten districts that filed nothing are already on the clock for the public meetings their communities are entitled to.