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state’s general fund and the State Public School Fund to put much-needed money into a new school finance formula designed to bolster at-risk learning dollars for students with special education, English language learning, and Free/Reduced Lunch needs. Substantially reduced in the new formula are dollars that accommodate school employees who work in expensive-to-live locations and similar factors. District size is also reduced in value to the formula and the impact of declining enrollment effects is ambiguous.
The debates have complex dimensions for every element of the bill that was put up for its first hearing with under one month left in the session. With less than two weeks to go, and a critical second reading vote coming up in the House, representatives will decide how hundreds of thousands of children will be treated over the next decade or more. No doubt a change in the formula is necessary. How that change occurs is what’s at stake.
Here are the bill’s controversial pieces:
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The at-risk money follows the students. In today’s competitive education environment, with charter schools created to compete with public schools for students, the bill puts a dollar amount on at-risk children substantially higher than for non-at-risk students. At-risk children bring that increased revenue to the schools that enroll them. The bill encourages "weighted student budgeting," the principle underlying "money follows the student."
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At-risk children, treated as value-based commodities, essentially become worth more in the market economy that Senate bill 1448 sponsor Paul Lundeen sees as the most powerful reform of public school education.
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Sponsors ask for a study of "weighted student budgeting" on districts. This is controversial because of the difficulty of unbiased analysis and what the report will cover. The current description focuses the study on "districts." At least as important is the impact of weighted student budgeting on how charters attempt to attract these "weighted students" for the revenue they represent and how student movement back and forth affects the public school landscape. Currently in the bill, it's unclear as to what guardrails are set around how the money floats between and among district schools, charter schools, charter institute schools, and school districts.
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Public district schools do not have marketing and sales capacity. As charter schools look to a higher revenue opportunity in an environment of declining enrollment, at-risk children will be their target, which is already evident in the high percentage of minority students in many charter schools in Denver Public Schools. This trend in Denver will proceed and grow in other districts, creating more segregation in our already segregated state public school system.
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Without very specific guardrails on how the money is directed once it gets to the schools, there is significant risk that the increased funding will not achieve its goals of providing more services to special education students or achieving improved language learning among non-English speaking children.
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The House defeated an earlier bill, Charter School Accountability, that HB-1448 sponsor House Rep. Jennifer Bacon supported to give more structure to charter school governance and to give local school districts more insight into how their charters operate. HB24-1363 would have eliminated automatic waivers by charters of policies related to distribution of dollars, teacher performance evaluation, staff hiring, salary schedules, purchasing procedures, etc. Bacon’s sponsorship of HB-1448 puts her in an important and unique position related to how accountability for the new at-risk funds from no new sources of revenue will be protected and secured.
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Automatic charter school waivers, if left automatic, substantially limit oversight of the new at-risk taxpayer public dollars. Charter school governance by unelected boards without parent inclusion create their own array of issues with lots of new money in play.
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Large suburban schools have objected to the bill because their funding may not significantly improve to help their at-risk students. Rural schools support the bill because they will receive much-needed new dollars.
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This zero-sum game of current revenue sources as a solution to at-risk funding is a rob Peter to pay Paul structure that doesn’t address the fundamental problems in public school finance. The zero-sum game includes uneven and undependable property taxes and mill levies as a main element of funding, state underwriting through the general fund of underfunded districts, and 2024 initiatives that may put a crowbar in the gears of the whole public education funding machine.
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As the bill may offer a temporary solution that may lead to a more permanent structure, certainly bill opponents will want more protections from the downsides of putting new money into a thirty-year problem (that’s how long the current formula has been in place) without a more complete framework explaining how the money will be sourced, secured, protected, directed, and evaluated for results.
Tuesday will see the first results of the epic weekend negotiation. There are some other big bills still out there and more will be introduced. Last year’s session was panned because of late bill chaos. Looks like this session may be deja-vu.
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