Lawmakers are promoting remedial math — not only for students, but for the education funding formula they say isn’t adding up for many Minnesota school districts.
Rep. Mark Buesgens (R-Jordan) sponsors HF1376, which would change the compensatory revenue category based on numbers of students eligible for free or reduced-cost lunch to a remedial revenue program based on numbers of certain students requiring academic remediation.
The proposal would allocate the same per-pupil amount for each eligible student, eliminating the concentration factor that generates more revenue for districts such as Minneapolis and St. Paul, which have more school sites with higher percentages of eligible students than most suburban or rural districts. Currently the same student might generate $100 at a low-percentage site but $2,500 at a high-percentage site.
“There needs to be a little more logic placed on how we fund schools and some fairness and balance throughout,” Buesgens told the House K-12 Education Finance Division March 26.
In the current site-based system, said Rep. Pat Garofalo (R-Farmington), “We are actually building an incentive into the program for districts to draw their attendance boundaries in a manner that crams all the poor kids into one school.”
Garofalo and Buesgens said they are unaware of any other state using the concentration factor to the extent Minnesota does.
St. Paul Public Schools’ lobbyist Mary Gilbert said she “respectfully disagrees” with the premise that all need is equivalent.
“There is a difference between poor people and people in poverty,” Gilbert said, because urban families often face acute destabilizing factors, such as lack of adequate housing, health care and family literacy with less access to helpful resources, such as extended family and church or community support, than families in small town or rural areas.
The division laid the bill over for possible omnibus bill inclusion. It has no Senate companion.
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