NEWS

School funding major issue on ballot

Kate Royals
The Clarion-Ledger

Mississippi voters will decide on a major school funding issue Nov. 3 after years of heated debate over exactly how much money schools should receive to educate children.

Educators, advocates and parents have long pushed for the Legislature to fully fund the Mississippi Adequate Education Program, the formula that stipulates the amount of money each school district needs to give its students an adequate education each year.

As it stands now in Mississippi, the state constitution only requires the Legislature to provide a “free” system of public schools, with no mention of the quality of that education. And despite current law requiring full funding of MAEP, lawmakers have fully funded the formula only twice since 1997.

Enter Initiative 42, the citizen-sponsored ballot initiative that would amend the state constitution to put more teeth into the state's requirements around school funding and quality of education.

Proponents of Initiative 42 say they are simply trying to make the Legislature follow its own law.

Opponents of Initiative 42, many of them lawmakers, say the wording of the amendment does not even refer specifically to funding or MAEP and takes power from the Legislature and gives it to the courts. Rep. Greg Snowden, R-Meridian, who authored the Legislature's alternative to Initiative 42, has called 42 an "assault on representative democracy."

Although the proposed language does not explicitly mention MAEP, Initiative 42 would change Section 201 of the state constitution to require the state to provide an “adequate and efficient” public education system. It is expected the courts would use the law to determine the meaning of adequacy in “adequate and efficient” public education system. Right now, MAEP provides that definition.

History of school funding

Lawmakers designed MAEP, which was signed into law in 1997 and phased in over the next several years, to address two major issues in school districts: equity of funding and adequacy of education. In the late 1980s and early 1990s across the country, school districts were suing states, alleging they were failing to provide students an adequate education and to provide equitable funding, regardless of whether a school district brought in a lot or a little from property taxes.

In 1990, then-state Sen. Ronnie Musgrove, who later would serve as governor, heard Kentucky's chief justice speak about a lawsuit filed by property-poor rural school districts claiming the state education funding system violated the constitution. The court ultimately ruled the state’s “entire system of common schools … unconstitutional.”

“I talked with him at length, and afterward I came back and realized that we had a problem with equity and we had a problem with adequacy,” Musgrove recalled.

He said one example of equity was a high school in one property-rich school district that offered 140 courses to students, where a school in a more rural, though successful, district only offered 75 to 80.

Over the next several years, lawmakers worked on crafting MAEP. In simple terms, the formula uses school districts performing at mid-level, according to the state’s accountability system to determine a base student cost. That number is then multiplied by the district’s average daily attendance, or the number of students in all grades in attendance during two months of the preceding school year.

In the Canton Public School District, for example, the base student cost of $5,354.98 was multiplied by 3,300.74, the average daily attendance as determined last year, which totals $17,675,397. All districts receive a certain amount of "at-risk funding," which is calculated by multiplying 5 percent of the base student cost by the number of free and reduced lunch participants. Canton's at-risk component is $950,513 this year, totaling $18,625,910.

Sen. Hob Bryan, D-Amory, helped write the law. Bryan explained the at-risk portion of the formula is not intended to go to specific programs or particular children but instead provide some money to districts in poor communities.

The at-risk component seeks to give additional resources not to districts with a smaller tax base, which is covered in a separate section of the formula, but to provide additional resources to districts with poorer communities.

“We knew, as everyone knows, that in a wealthier community you have more resources than in a poor community,” Bryan explained. “If you need band uniforms, all the extras that parents bring with them, that’s much more easily done in a more affluent area. So we wanted to have some additional funds going to the economically poor districts.”

Because the formula seeks to provide an equal playing field for districts with both wealthy and poor tax bases, the local contribution is subtracted from the allocation. This school year, Canton received around $5 million in local contributions, an uptick from previous years because of Nissan taxes and growth in the area.

If the Legislature had fully funded MAEP this school year, Canton would have received $13,596,914. However, the district came up about $1.1 million short of that due to underfunding.

Funds for add-on programs — including special education, vocational education, gifted education and others — are added to the total cost. In Canton, the district lost out on about $200,000 for its add-on programs because of underfunding, giving  it at a total MAEP allocation of $14,777,299.

Canton Superintendent Ike Haynes said when the state doesn't fully fund public schools, the burden falls on local taxpayers as millage rates increase.

One of the most pressing needs the district has is more reading coaches. Third-graders in Canton scored in the bottom third of students on the third-grade gate, and Haynes has placed a poster on the back of his office door with the district's passing score as a reminder of how far the district has to go.

Currently, the state has provided two reading coaches, and Haynes has hired three others using federal funds. An additional two coaches were made possible through a grant from Nissan.

But at Goodloe Elementary, interventionist Lakisha Watkins serves the whole school. Though her focus is on 25 third-graders, she works with a total of 76 students across grades.

Criticism by auditor, lawmakers

One of the most visible and outspoken critics of MAEP  is State Auditor Stacey Pickering.

Each year, the state auditor’s office is required by law to verify the estimated calculations for MAEP submitted to the Legislative Budget Office.

The most recent report focused on what it says are problems with the use of "C"-level districts to calculate base student cost for all districts, the reliance on historical expenditures as opposed to actual costs and the lack of a link between funding and performance.

“The formula ineffectively uses MDE’s ‘C’-level schools as the starting point for efficiency — not performance," the report stated, referring to the Mississippi Department of Education. "In fact, to state this point very clearly, district educational performance is not actually measured as an outcome, in the MAEP formula.”

Pickering points specifically to the calculation of teacher salaries and benefits, which he says are calculated based on past costs, as an example.

“The components of the BSC (base student cost) all utilize historical expenditure information rather than actual costs. This means that each of the 149 districts’ projected salaries and benefits are based on the historical expenditures of essentially the classroom salaries and benefits of only the 30, or so “C”-rated schools — $3,007.22/per student in those districts,” Pickering wrote. (Through consolidation, there are now 146 districts.)

The formula should account for educational need, not equity and adequacy, Pickering argues.

“Education need should be defined in terms of the dollars required to provide a given desirable outcome and thus should be linked to performance in some way,” the report stated.

Asked how all 146 districts could be evaluated based on performance, Pickering cited other states like South Carolina as examples the Legislature could study.

South Carolina uses a cost factor called “weighting” to ensure funds are equitably distributed on the basis of student need. Last year, South Carolina added four categories to the weighted classifications: high achieving, limited English proficiency, academic assistance and pupils in poverty. Each has a weight factor associated with it that determines the level of additional funding the student receives.

Because of changes made by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, South Carolina changed from using free and reduced lunch participants, as Mississippi does, to determine "pupils in poverty." It now bases the qualifications on factors such as whether the child's family receives benefits like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, food stamps or Medicaid. It also looks at whether the child is homeless or in foster care.

Some in the Legislature have echoed Pickering's idea, saying MAEP is too input-driven and more focus should be given to outcomes.

“We’re not supposed to be tracking the way any penny of it is spent. Our schools are run by the local school districts,” Bryan said, noting measures like state conservatorship are in place if a school district is failing to meet educational standards.

The auditor’s office and some legislators are also critical of what they say are excessive administrative costs in some school districts.

Bryan said the auditor’s office does not understand the formula or its purpose.

“If there are problems with administrative costs, the way to deal with that is the local school board,” he said. “… This is a new notion the Republicans have that the state of Mississippi is supposed to come fine tune what local officials are doing.”

As lieutenant governor in 1997, Musgrove led the charge to get the MAEP passed despite a veto by Republican Gov. Kirk Fordice. He echoed Bryan when responding to the auditor’s criticisms.

“In the statute, it calls upon him to audit (MAEP), and it’s up to the Legislature to accept his proposed changes, and the Legislature never has,” Musgrove said. “And this is a Republican-led Legislature that has not accepted his criticisms or his suggestions. And they’ve calculated the formula just like the formula calls for, but just simply have not funded it, which in my opinion the law does not allow.”

Rep. John Moore, R-Brandon, said legislative leaders want to carefully consider any potential changes to MAEP.

“There’s been talk for the last four years of looking at the way the formula’s done and limiting the amount of money that can be used for administration,” said Moore, who chairs the House Education Committee.

Moore said the Legislature hasn’t made any major changes to MAEP because of concerns about a negative impact on high-performing school districts.

“We want to look at it from one end to the other, both the significant and insignificant. The Senate leadership has been looking at it, the House leadership. This summer we’ve all been consumed with the elections, but I’m sure after November we’ll be looking at different alternatives,” he said.

Contact Kate Royals at (601) 360-4619 or kroyals@gannett.com. Follow @KRRoyals on Twitter.

MAEP Formula

1. Average daily attendance x base student cost + at-risk component - local contribution + 8 percent guarantee = MAEP formula allocation

2. MAEP formula allocation + add-on programs = Total MAEP district funding

  • Average daily attendance: Number of students in grades K-12 in the second and third months of preceding school year
  • Base student cost: Based on districts determined to be successful and efficient in four areas of school operations
  • At-risk component: 5 percent of the base student cost multiplied by the number of free lunch participants
  • Local contribution: Amount of ad valorem taxes from 2nd preceding year's data