Afton Partners

School districts spend on average about 22 percent of their budgets on special education, Donahue said — up from 13 percent in 2006-07, according to an association survey of business administrators. While districts can’t increase their budgets by more than 2 percent without voter approval, “special-education costs have no cap,” Donahue said. The costs have added to school district budget pressures in a state with some of the highest property taxes in the country — and that has for years failed to follow its formula for distributing money to schools.

Under the compromise S.F. 455 version, $2.8 million was set aside to increase the per-pupil allocation by $5 per student in 161 districts, including Davenport. In those districts, there is up to $175 per pupil inequity in the funding. Meanwhile, the bill also provides that 140 of the state’s 333 school districts will get a share of the $11.2 million to deal with transportation funding inequities. Transportation costs run as high as $970 per pupil per year at North Winneshiek.

For two decades, the state’s goal on paper has been to spend more money on poor students than on their wealthier peers. In fact, that’s become the goal in much of the U.S. as a wave of court decisions have directed states to send more money to poorer school districts so their students have an equal shot at meeting their states’ academic expectations. Still, most states, like Maine, fall short of that goal. Most manage merely to spend roughly equal amounts per student, according to a 2017 analysis of state education spending by the Urban Institute.