INDIANAPOLIS – Superintendents of high-scoring, high-performing schools have long complained about a convoluted formula that costs them millions of dollars in state funds. Republicans pledge to help – while narrowing the gap between how much flows to those schools and others that don’t do as well.
Details have yet to emerge to indicate how the state will change its approach to spending $6 billion in education money, though any decision likely will depend on revenue estimates due in December.
Lawmakers are discussing proposals such as lifting minimum funding levels for school districts, which would narrow the $4,000-per-pupil difference between how much the state’s most subsidized schools receive and how much goes to those with the least amount of funding.
Another idea would tie student performance to more than $1 billion in funds for schools with students in poverty.
Whatever the outcome, Republicans say “fixing” the formula is high on their priority list for the legislative session that starts in January. Republicans are expected to keep control of the Statehouse in the upcoming elections.
“This range of 40 percent between the highest and lowest funded schools in the state is a big concern,” said House and Ways Means Chairman Tim Brown, R-Crawfordsville. “People scratch their head and say, ‘How can this be?’”
Superintendents in the state’s least-funded districts have tried to answer the question for years, said Zionsville Community Schools Superintendent Scott Robison. He’s leading a coalition of about 40 district superintendents in lobbying to change what they call a “broken” formula.
Most often parents are the ones who question the disparity, Robison said, and ask why some of the state’s wealthiest schools are cutting programs and staff, thus increasing classroom size.
The answer is complicated but rooted in the state’s takeover of school funding in 2008, while at the same time capping local property taxes that once boosted revenues for affluent districts. Zionsville has since been on the losing end, with other districts like it.
Before the change, Zionsville got about $5,800 per student from state and local tax revenues each year. Now it’s allotment is closer to $4,900 – or about $800 less than the state average.
For Zionsville, that adds up to $5 million less a year – enough to cover 80 teachers’ salaries.
Two years ago, Zionsville voters approved a referendum to temporarily raise taxes to offset some of the local schools’ losses.
Robison doesn’t think he should have to ask again.
“We just think enough is enough,” he said. “Our students deserve adequate and equitable funding, instead of this serial instability that comes from what amounts to double taxation.”
Some House Republicans suggest the state can raise the most basic level of funding for all schools, if its projected revenues rise by at least 2 percent.
Dennis Costerison, head of the Indiana Association of School Business Officials, said he would like to see every district in the state get more “foundation” funding per pupil in that scenario.
“There’s not a district in the state that couldn’t use more money,” Costerison said.
Brown, a powerful fiscal gatekeeper in the General Assembly, said he’s optimistic about revenue projections, with a caveat: “I could make all sorts of statements, but in two months from now, they could be all out the window depending on what the state revenue forecast says.”
But Democrats say they’re skeptical about how changing the funding formula will play out.
House Minority Leader Scott Pelath (D-Michigan City) said public schools are suffering because the Republican-controlled Legislature routinely “took a meat cleaver” to their funding while increasing dollars for private-school vouchers and charter schools.
Senate Minority Leader Tim Lanane, D-Anderson, is wary over the revenue forecast.
The state’s revenues have fallen below projections over the last year, he said, and he doesn’t think Republicans will budge off promises not to raise taxes and to maintain the state's $2 billion in reserves.
He worries that significant changes to the formula will create winners and losers, with the losers being schools that now get the most per student.
“The pot is only so big. The money has to come from somewhere,” he said. “My concern is that it will come from urban and rural schools in districts with the highest poverty levels, with students who need the most help.”
The school formula has undergone major changes over the last two decades. Built-in guarantees had funneled more dollars to schools that have lost enrollment, or it still sends more money to schools with higher student poverty rates.
The Republican-controlled Legislature voted four years ago to remove some of those automatic aspects of the formula over seven years. Lawmakers are expected to consider speeding up that timetable, causing schools to gain or lose state funds more quickly than planned.
Also under closer scrutiny is the state’s “complexity index,” a measure of student poverty that boosts the funding for schools.
At a briefing last week, House Speaker Brian Bosma (R-Indianapolis) didn’t dispute the idea that students in poverty tend to be less prepared for school than their wealthier counterparts, and therefore more expensive to educate.
But Republicans will likely push for more accountability in how $1.2 billion in funds tied to the complexity index are spent. Some want more of those dollars tied to metrics such as academic performance, student growth, and graduation rates.