Last week, a joint panel of lawmakers met in Montgomery to continue an effort to evaluate the process of changing Alabama's public K-12 education funding formula.
During the hearing, House education budget chairman State Rep. Danny Garrett (R-Trussville) and his upper-chamber counterpart State Sen. Arthur Orr (R-Decatur) emphasized any changes would not include shifting local funding between different school districts.
Monday, during an appearance on Mobile radio FM Talk 106.5's "The Jeff Poor Show," Garrett elaborated on the "ground rules" for any changes to the formula to proceed.
"Well, the first thing you do is, there's about, and I don't hold me to this number, but I think it's about $2.5 billion of local money that's right now outside the funding formula that we use in the state," he explained. "That $2.5 billion in our marching orders and our ground rules we laid forth to the consultants that are going to help us analyze all of this and to our committee, we said that $2.5 billion will remain outside this formula. So, any system that has been a local issue, our mindset and our ground rule is number one: that money will not be affected by what we do now. So, local money stays with the locals."
"Number two, we don't want any system to lose," he continued. "So now how does that happen? Because right now, if you look at the weeds of the calculations, you'll find that some of the more fluent systems receive less state money per pupil than some of the poorer systems under the current formula. And that's how it is at the end of the day. We do not want any system to have less funding than they would get going forward. So how do you do that? I don't know. Number one, is it possible that we can come up with a model that addresses all the ground rules we set forth? We think so, but we don't know. We'll find out. But what we would do would be to make sure — we set aside a couple of reserves."
"We had this new educational opportunity fund. And part of that fund that's building right now, we believe needs to be utilized for the changes in the education community. Part of it could be to help us transition to the funding that we're talking about under this funding model change. The other would be if school choice really takes hold and starts to really be a big demand, we'll need to address that."
"So, one of the reasons for this new education opportunities reserve fund, that right now has about $700 million in it, or maybe a billion in it now, but after this year, about a billion in it will actually be available for us to look at some of these changes we want to make to the current way we fund education in the state. But our ground rule one is that no system loses money, that no local money gets brought into this formula, or change will be impacted by the change. And so those are the basic ground rules that are important to both Chairman Orr and myself as the chair of this effort, and then I'm sure our committees feel the same way."
Jeff Poor is the editor in chief of 1819 News and host of "The Jeff Poor Show," heard Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-noon on Mobile's FM Talk 106.5. To connect or comment, email jeff.poor@1819News.com or follow him on Twitter @jeff_poor.
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