Following decades of constitutional amendments and a legislative committee created last year to study how the state funds its schools, a new bill was introduced to revise the state’s school finance law, which has not been changed since 1994.
The state’s public K-12 education, which serves about 900,000 students, is funded by local property taxes, state income and sales taxes, and federal funds primarily for lower income students. Only one third of school funding is derived from property taxes; the rest comes from the state’s budget.
Because of Colorado's Taxpayers' Bill of Rights, lawmakers are restricted from levying any new taxes or increases without first gaining voter approval. No tax increases have been approved since the Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights was introduced in 1992, save one. When voters legalized the recreational use of marijuana, they approved a ballot measure that stipulated that the first $40 million of sales tax revenue from marijuana be allocated to school funding.
This tax has not offset shrinking revenue from property taxes, which has impacted school budgets. One way legislators have attempted to supplement school districts’ budgets is regular use of Mill Levy Overrides.
Mill Levy Overrides are ballot measures that ask voters living in a specific school district to approve the collection of additional “mills” on property taxes, above what the state allows. The additional tax collection is then directly distributed to the voters’ school district, which largely exclude charter schools. According to the Colorado League of Charter Schools, only 11 of the state’s 178 school districts equitably share their mill levy income with charter schools.
In 2017, Sens. Owen Hill, R-Colorado Springs, and Angela Williams, D-Denver, introduced Senate Bill 61, which required the state’s school districts to share a portion of override revenue with charter schools. According to a legislative report, school districts would be required to send to the state’s charter schools a combined total of $94.4 million. In 2017, lawmakers reached a compromise at the last minute, allowing the bill to pass. The law also requires legislators to find nearly $13 million in the budget to send to charter schools. The bill goes into full effect in 2020.
Before the public hearing for SB61, Williams tweeted, “Colorado charter schools are NOT private schools. SB61 will repair inequity in school funding and give equal opportunity to all public school students.”
However, the mill levies have only acted as a stopgap measure, critics argue, and a long-term solution is needed to address the underlying causes of the state’s several hundred million dollars in school funding shortfall. Colorado schools are experiencing teacher shortages, aging buildings, limited funding to operate programs, outdated curriculum, and cut backs on bus routes. But the biggest problem, the state’s superintendents argue, is an outdated school funding model that allocates state resources tied to certain metrics that don’t necessarily apply to a particular school district, making them unusable.
This year, 171 school superintendents proposed a new funding model, which was adopted and introduced by House Democrats Dave Young and Andy Kerr and Republican Don Coram.
"When you see this kind of grassroots action, elected officials take notice," Young told the Greeley Tribune. "We have a massive crisis in our public education system. We must take action now.”
House Bill 18-1232 would replace the 1994 model by "modernizing" the per-pupil funding formula. Currently, each district receives a certain amount of money on top of a base amount of $6,546 per student. Amounts are determined by cost of living estimates and the number of students who receive free lunches.
The existing formula funds only a half day of kindergarten, for example, in districts where full days are offered. It also neglects higher-need students like the gifted and talented, English language learners and special-needs. Their education is partially funded through "categoricals," a set dollar amount the state allocates that has no correlation to the number or needs of the students.
The new model first increases the amount of per-pupil money for four higher-need groups of students: impoverished, gifted-and-talented, English-language learners, and special-needs. These groups are weighted, meaning they receive a certain percentage more of funding per student. The weights vary by district with smaller districts (up to 456 students) receiving the most and largest districts (more than 1,700 students) receiving the least. The superintendents devised an algorithm to determine the weights for districts with the average size. After the four groups are weighted, the formula then adjusts for cost of living and district size.
“It’s about equity and adequacy, not in the sense of dollar-for-dollar, but similar opportunities for every student,” Glenn McClain, superintendent of Platte Valley Re-7 School District in Kersey, said in a news release.
If the bill passes, it will be added to the next general election ballot for voter approval.
Last year, the legislature approved a deal to allow for more tax revenue for education by changing how it collects hospital fees. It also sent $30 million to rural schools, and roughly $240 more per student to schools statewide.