Wyoming School Financing Scrutinized (WY)
April 28, 2010
Developing a fair formula for funding schools across Wyoming is always a complex and politically sensitive issue, and this year is no exception, as how small schools are funded has been a recent concern in Park County and elsewhere. The topic came up again as the Legislature began its five-year review of the state’s school funding model, a process known as recalibration.
Members of the Select Committee on School Finance Recalibration met last week by video teleconference from locations across the state, reviewing the existing model before discussing in future meetings what changes might be needed to improve the process.
“We’re anxious during this recalibration process to try to review extensively how districts and schools are spending their resources,” said committee co-chair Sen. Hank Coe, R-Cody.
Coe said the L egislature has increased funding steadily since 1997, making special adjustments for small schools and reimbursing all schools for the full cost of transportation and special education.
He said that since 1997, the state has “put significant additional resources into the model.” That has come despite declining overall enrollment since then, and what Coe said was “arguably less additional student achievement than anticipated.”
The funding model was developed with advice from a panel of education professionals in response to a Wyoming Supreme Court decision, said Matt Willmarth, a Legislative Service Office staff member.
During the last recalibration, in 2005, legislators worked to improve the model’s transparency by “moving a lot of the resources from the district level to the school level,” Willmarth said.
Schools are funded largely based on their enrollment level, staff experience and structure.
Since 2005, legislators have made periodic funding adjustments, providing more than $90 million in additional funds, Willmarth said.
Guaranteed state funding for local schools stood at approximately $518 million in 1997 and has risen steadily every year but one since then, now topping out at more than $1.2 billion.
Coe said the funding model, although complex, was transparent, and allowed for the greatest control at the local level, where school boards, parents and school staff together can decide how to distribute funds.
But some legislators wondered whether the model was right for small schools.
“We have a problem with how many teachers are generated to teach what we’re requiring to be tau ght,” said Sen. Kathryn Sessions, Democrat, of Cheyenne. She questioned whether small schools, in particular, received enough money for teachers.
Block grants
Dave Nelson, a Legislative Service Office staff member, said that the model provides significant additional funding to small schools in the form of block grants.
“It is a block grant, but we give no direction that you should use that additional small-school funding to provide the teachers you need in those small schools,” Sessions said.
Jim Sessions, the senator’s son, lives near Meeteetse, and presented that town’s school board last week with a petition protesting funding cuts announced last month that will mean the loss of at least two teachers in the next school year.
He did not attend last week’s committee meting, but Sessions said during the Meeteetse board meeting that the petition had 198 signatures, and that it called for the resignation of four of the five board members and the superintendent.
He told the board that signers “disagree with both the process and the budget decisions” and protested what he called the board’s “total disregard for input, opinions and the democratic process.“
He and other signers have said they favor tapping at least 10 percent of the school’s substantial reserve funds of about $3 million to continue funding teachers and programs at current levels until the recalibration process is complete.
Coe has said he thinks recalibration is unlikely to yield major changes in total funding for Meeteetse or any other school.
Because small schools, those with 49 students or less, receive additional fundin g, they stand to lose some of that extra money if a school grows from 47 students to 52, for instance.
Sen. Mike Massie, Democrat, of Laramie, said he worried about how what he called “the cliff effect” of crossing such a threshold could leave growing small schools facing a funding shortfall at the same time they are adding more students.
Co-chair Rep. Del McOmie, R-Lander, said that the funding formula uses a three-year rolling average of total enrollment, so any “cliff effect” would be averaged over that period.
Sen. Phil Nicholas, Republican, of Laramie, wondered whether some schools, particularly smaller ones, were suffering under a funding model that provided money for several “fractional” teachers, or part-time positions, but perhaps not enough full-time teachers.
Willmarth said that many schools use block grant funds to hire teachers who split their time between subjects or grades.
“If you have resources for half a tutor and half a teacher, you might get a full-time teacher and split that time between tutoring” and standard teaching duties, he said.
Salary costs
Small schools must be especially careful in how they manage personnel costs, said Jerry Erdahl, superintendent of Washakie County School District 2, made up of less than 100 students at the Ten Sleep school, the state’s smallest district.
Many schools focus on teacher spending, when support staff salaries also represent a large part of their budgets, Erdahl said during a break in last week’s committee meeting. In Ten Sleep, the school has hired one staff member to help with custodial, vehicle and maintenance chores, while some other smaller districts might employ t hree separate full-time workers for each department, he said.
It’s also important to know how the state’s funding formula works, and to stay on top of how changes in the school’s staff, enrollment and structure might affect its funding, said Jonna Abel, a 12-year member of Ten Sleep’s school board.
When Ten Sleep made kindergarten an all-day program, the additional student hours pushed the school into a larger enrollment bracket, which threatened to cut nearly $1 million in special small-school allowances from its funding, she said.
In response, the school changed how it was structured, moving to a “multi-age” model that allows teachers to work with students from different grade levels, and balancing out the lost funding based on how the state interpreted the new structure.
Abel said the move was a success, but required extensive discussions with parents, who wanted kindergarten students kept separate form the mixed-age classes, and taught specifically by kindergarten teachers.
“We had a lot of meetings with parents, and let parents have a lot of input, working to address their concerns. You have to educate people about the process and make sure you listen to your community’s concerns,” she said.
The select committee meets again May 19-20 in Casper.