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Trends in the News

Funding Equity

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Education Week, 3/15/18

Indianapolis, Puerto Rico, and three other districts raise their hands for funding pilot

Indianapolis, Puerto Rico, and three other school districts have applied to join the Every Student Succeeds Act’s weighted student-funding pilot during the 2018-19 school year. Participating districts can combine federal, state, and local dollars into a single funding stream tied to individual students. English-language learners, children in poverty, and students in special education—who cost more to educate—would carry with them more money than other students.

Texas Tribune, 3/16/18

Will Texas school finance panel tell schools to do more with less? Some members think it’s predetermined

He said the commission has also heard from school leaders with innovative ideas on subjects such as how to keep the best teachers at the most challenging schools and how to use full-day pre-K to get students at an academic baseline early in life. “Those two things without question cannot be funded or sustained with the current funding levels we have,” Bernal said. “Even the districts that piloted it said they were about to run out of money.”

Chalkbeat Colorado, 3/19/18

Done doing ‘more with less,’ Brighton district will move to a four-day school week

The change is expected to save the district about $1 million a year, but Brighton Superintendent Chris Fiedler previously told Chalkbeat that the biggest benefit will be “to attract and retain teachers” in a district whose salaries are among the lowest in the metro area. “I realize this will be a significant change for our students, their families, and the communities we are so fortunate to serve, but our district can no longer be expected to do more with less financial resources,” Fiedler said in a press release.

The Inquirer, 3/12/18

New Jersey grapples with solutions to soaring special-education costs

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.

Quad-City Times, 2/26/18

Iowa Senate passes plan to address per-pupil school funding inequity

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.

Education Week, 2/27/18

Reporting school-by-school spending data: Inside Rhode Island’s approach

The state has been grappling with ways to cut costs in some districts where student population has plummeted. Separately, charter school advocates and public school officials have bickered over whether they’re getting their fair share of state funds. “We are public officials, and this adds another level of transparency for the public to see what we do on a daily basis,” he said.

Education Week, 2/27/18

States confront new mandate on school-spending transparency

ESSA requires districts to break out school-level spending by December 2019—a first-time federal requirement. It’s a level of detail unknown even to most district superintendents. Various interest groups are split over whether such items as transportation, technology, special education, and pre-K—some of the biggest drivers of the rise in school spending—should be categorized as regular school costs, or as extraordinary costs or overhead. Illinois ultimately decided to leave some decisionmaking authority with district officials over how to split those costs. “There are ramifications for each decision point,” Wolfe said. “We had to ask how does it help make data-driven decisions within districts?” said Robert Wolfe, Illinois’ chief financial officer.

Maine Focus, 1/29/18

Maine tried to send more money to its poor schools. It didn’t finish the job.

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.

The Baltimore Sun, 1/23/18

Baltimore school board approves new student funding plan based on poverty rates

The Baltimore school board on Tuesday approved broad changes to the way city schools are funded, allowing money to be allotted based largely on student poverty levels rather than standardized test scores. The new formula will send more money to many schools in high-poverty neighborhoods, enabling principals to pay for psychologists, tutoring services or other tools that could better serve children in need.