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It's the final countdown
We are officially in the last full week of the legislative session and counting down to the last day, which is Wednesday, May 8. Since this is my last and final session, I am approaching these last 10 days with both a sense of urgency and enthusiasm. A fair number of my bills are still moving through the legislature, including 16 House bills and 10 Senate bills, but since I've already discussed many of these bills, I'd like to focus on one bill that is particularly meaningful to me: HB24-1448 concerning the creation of a modernized approach to funding public education.
Last week the legislature approved the School Finance Act which funds our public schools. In that bill, we eliminated the Budget Stabilization Factor and for the first time since 2009, we will fully fund our schools according to Amendment 23. While I recognize that the amount of funding for our schools is completely inadequate, the way in which we distribute that funding is also not adequate. Our current school finance formula is outdated, inequitable, confusing, and most concerning, not focused on student needs.
What is wrong with Colorado's current school finance formula? For starters, the formula is outdated. There have been no large changes or meaningful rewrites of the formula in nearly 30 years. The world and the needs of students have drastically changed over the last three decades. The formula is also complicated. We rely on a formula that is a web of confusing and overly complex calculations that directs more funding to wealthy districts, rather than directing funds to students who are living in poverty, English Language Learners, or who have special needs. The current formula is also ineffective. Year over year we lament about the lack of achievement for at-risk students, English learners, and special education students, and yet we continue to direct funding away from those students.
So what does HB24-1448 do? First, the bill fixes the order of operations. Currently, district factors such as Cost of Living are applied to the student base before student weights. As a consequence, at-risk students in low-cost-of-living districts receive measurably less supplemental funding from the state than they would if they lived in higher cost-of-living districts. The new formula shifts the student factors to the front of the calculation. Second, we eliminate the multiplicity of Cost-of-Living and Size Factors, which distributes large amounts of dollars to districts that do not educate a large population of high need students. Additionally, the new formula rebases the Cost-of-Living Factor based on recent data and eliminates the Personnel Factor from the formula. Student weights for At-Risk students and English language learners will increase, and we add a new Special Education factor. Lastly, we make targeted adjustments to the Size and Cost-of-Living factors and create a new Locale Factor to account for remoteness.
Under our proposal, no districts will “lose” money, and a small handful of districts will be held harmless. A funding floor would be established for districts in which their new formula funding cannot drop beneath FY24-25 under current law. Also, districts that educate a large number of students who need more supports, especially At-Risk, ELL, and Special Education students, would see a dramatic increase in funding to help better support their needs. And rural districts, especially small rurals, would see an increase of $250 million once fully implemented.
I've been asked whether the new formula would be sustainable, and I can assure you that as a five year member of the Joint Budget Committee and a four-time sponsor of the School Finance Act, the answer is YES! We crafted the new formula responsibly and with guardrails in place. These changes would not happen all at once, either. We recognize that there needs to be an adequate runway for districts to adjust, and therefore we will phase in the changes over a period of six years. Furthermoe, the House Appropriations Committee recently adopted an amendment that will help ensure that more funding is directed to districts with a minimal increase in funding under the new formula.
I could continue discussing the need for this update or go into more depth about the specifics, including the evidence that demonstrates how the proposal is sustainable, but I've already gone on too long. Nevertheless, if I leave the state legislature having accomplished two things--eliminate the Budget Stabilization Factor and improve our outdated formula so that all students are funded fairly and equitably--then I am satisfied with my service as your State Senator these last eight years.
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