Colorado’s school superintendents are sending up a smoke signal asking for help, and everyone across the state should be listening.
Not only are Colorado schools underfunded, a majority of superintendents are saying, but the way the state distributes billions of dollars in funding is inequitable and based on a broken formula that was put in place 24 years ago.
More than 170 superintendents are backing a bill at the Colorado Capitol that would completely reconfigure how school districts are funded, placing more emphasis on the attributes of students in the district than on the district itself to determine per-pupil state funding levels. House Bill 1232 is sponsored by Rep. Dave Young and Sen. Andy Kerr, both Democrats, and Sen. Don Coram, a Republican.
The catch is that even if the legislation for a new school funding formula is passed into law this year, it won’t take effect unless voters approve a tax increase of somewhere around $1.6 billion for schools, although that number is subject to change as non-partisan staff at the Capitol completes its fiscal impact analysis.
That money would accomplish two goals. First, it would hold school districts harmless to ensure the new formula doesn’t end up cutting funding to any single district. The new formula would create significant winners and losers without ensuring that base funding amount. Second, it would increase state funding to what it would be if lawmakers hadn’t shortchanged the Amendment 23-mandated funding levels with cuts that have come to be known as the negative factor.
“Even with this $1.6 billion that we need to be able to fund the formula, it doesn’t take us up to national average (of per-pupil funding),” said Wendy Rubin, superintendent of Englewood Public Schools. Superintendents, including Rubin, began the process two years ago of developing a plan to ensure schools are not only funded adequately, but that if state funding were increased, districts would also be funded equitably.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because it was also the premise behind Amendment 66 in 2013: pass legislation to reform Colorado’s broken school funding formula and then ask voters for a tax increase to fund the new formula. But when voters soundly rejected that $1 billion income tax hike, the funding formula reforms disappeared, too.
This editorial is not an endorsement of a tax hike — although we agree that Colorado schools are chronically underfunded and need additional resources to provide our kids with the education they need to compete in today’s economy. There are only vague proposals to put something on the ballot this fall that would increase school funding. But rather this is an endorsement of the first step in fixing the problem, passing a new funding formula to begin to address some of the inequities in how Colorado schools are funded.
A student’s ZIP code should not determine the quality of their education, and unfortunately, the current formula has created an inequitable system that has enabled just that to be the case.
The proposed formula would ensure districts receive more funding if they are serving students living in poverty, or those learning English as a second language, or gifted and talented students. Rural and small school districts would get more reasonable funding levels, given the diminished economies of scale they face. Additionally, the formula would for the first time fund kindergarten students for a full day, and change the preschool funding formula so there are no caps on half-day enrollment numbers.
There’s much to like in this proposed formula, and lawmakers should take this bipartisan, superintendent-backed legislation seriously.
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