Aid formula boosts some, curbs others

Pauline Silva has been bracing for this school year for a while now.
The director of administration and finance at the Bristol-Warren School District, Silva says school officials have cut 19 jobs and left vacant numerous assistant administrators positions.
Last week, she boasted that she had renegotiated the contract for photocopiers in the schools and the administration offices, slicing expenses by $39,000. Administrators also consolidated bus stops, allowing them to take one school bus off the road to save money.
The reason for the cost-cutting? The state’s new education funding formula, which went into effect July 1. The formula, which calculates the amount of state aid districts will receive based on enrollment as well as on the rate of student poverty, has been largely praised by educators, public officials and others.
But the Bristol-Warren School District is one of the biggest losers now that the formula, approved by the General Assembly a year ago, is in place for fiscal 2012.
The new calculations cut $784,812 from the $18.2 million Bristol-Warren received last year from the state. Next year, the aid will be reduced by another $784,812. Bristol-Warren can expect yearly reductions by that same amount through 2021.
By Silva’s count, the district stands to lose $44 million in state aid over the course of the decade.
That’s because the funding formula reduces, and then eventually eliminates, the aid bonus that regional school districts such as Bristol-Warren receive. Bristol-Warren schools have also seen a decline in enrollment.
Silva, for one, has accepted the outcome, acknowledging that the district has benefited from the state’s previous method of setting school-aid allocations, which has been frozen since early 2000, locking in Bristol-Warren to an artificially high amount.
“Now it’s someone else’s turn,” Silva said.
The funding formula was a long time in coming. Rhode Island had been the last state to implement an education-funding formula. Educators, state officials and others spent years ironing out the details, insisting that local communities needed a fair and predictable system.
The result: a complex formula that takes into account how many students are enrolled in a district, and how many are considered poor. Also factored is a community’s collective wealth, which is calculated by considering total assessed property value in the district and its median family income. Passage of a funding formula was a priority of Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist, who argued that it was needed to ensure that aid was equitably distributed among the state’s public schools.
Although the formula was approved by the General Assembly in 2010, advocates worried that the state’s fiscal woes would force state officials to delay its implementation for at least a year.
But Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee included it in his budget proposal in March, despite having to close a projected $300 million shortfall. And lawmakers passed that portion of the budget largely unchanged, appropriating $684.57 million to public schools statewide this year, a $17.6 million increase over 2011 allotment.
Inevitably, the new formula means there are winners and losers.
Aside from Bristol-Warren, 15 other communities are seeing annual aid reductions phased in annually over the next decade, including South Kingstown (-$371,317), Portsmouth (-$213,934), Exeter-West Greenwich (-$184,853) and Middletown (-$143,948). Central Falls School District, which is operated by the state, is due to lose $1.69 million annually in state aid over 10 years, according to state budget data.
For those communities that receive increases in aid, the additional money will be phased in over seven years.
Among the municipalities that are benefiting is Providence. For fiscal 2012, the capital city’s state aid has been boosted by $6.18 million annually over the $172.5 million it received last fiscal year.
Also on the plus side is Cranston, which is getting $2.35 million more annually, and Pawtucket, which is seeing a $2.09 million boost annually.
Tim Duffy, executive director of the Rhode Island Association of School Committees, said the formula isn’t perfect, but school boards desperately needed predictable funding calculations when assembling their budgets.
“We would have preferred that the state have the resources to hold harmless the losing communities – freeze them at the current rates, until the other communities caught up,” Duffy said. “Given the fiscal condition of the state, it wasn’t practical.”
School officials in Pawtucket and Woonsocket are upset, even though both communities are seeing more aid under the new formula. Lawyers representing both school districts say the formula underfunds communities that have student populations that need more assistance, particularly those learning to speak English.
The two districts filed a Superior Court lawsuit last year seeking to have the formula declared unconstitutional, even before it was passed by state legislators.
Attorneys Stephen Robinson and Samuel Zurier have pushed forward with the lawsuit, filing an amendment earlier this year that claimed the new calculations shortchange poorer school systems.
The aid increases in the current calculations “are small potatoes next to what we think [Pawtucket and Woonsocket should receive] under the right formula,” Zurier told Providence Business News. “The issue is getting enough money to educate kids to meet the standard.”
Zurier argued the new formula doesn’t take into account a district’s population of English-language learners, who generally require more resources.
“It’s puzzling,” he said. “Our Hispanic kids are among the lowest-performing kids in the country.”
The attorneys said the formula favors communities such as Newport, which has a high ratio of poor students, but few who are learning English.
Zurier also contended the formula is flawed because it uses an inaccurate baseline per-pupil expenditure, the estimated cost of educating an average student and a crucial part of the funding calculations.
The $8,295 baseline figure is based on instructional expenses, Zurier said, not other operational costs such as transportation.
Robinson said other recent changes in state funding will partially offset the increases in state aid for Pawtucket. One example: The district will have to pay full tuition for the students it sends to the state-run Davies Career and Technical High School in Lincoln.
Despite the criticism, advocates of the new formula say it’s a huge step forward. Elizabeth Burke Bryant, executive director of the nonprofit Rhode Island Kids Count, called getting it in place this year “a major victory.”
“For years, we didn’t have predictable funding,” said Burke Bryant, who led an advisory committee that assisted in developing the formula. “There’s a real sense of achievement in getting it implemented in this difficult budget year.” &#8226