Lawmakers sat behind rows of tables, like students at their desks, in the R.I. Senate Lounge one January night to hear a guest speaker detail a new plan to make public education throughout the state more fair and equitable.
“The future economic prosperity of our state is directly dependent on our ability to get this right,” Rhode Island Foundation CEO and President David Cicilline told senators as they dined on a hot buffet dinner and cake pops for dessert.
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For Cicilline, getting this right means overhauling the formula used to determine how the state and municipalities share the cost of public education, with the state taking on more costs. The state generally covers more than half of local education costs – but its contribution is more like 38% when factoring in things it doesn’t fully pay for, like transportation and certain special education and multilingual learning costs that vary wildly from year to year or place to place.
Cicilline, a former congressman and Providence mayor, has spent the first half of 2026 visiting about 20 groups across the state as the public face of a campaign to change the state’s education aid funding formula using recommendations developed over a year by a Blue Ribbon Commission he chaired.
Legislation to gradually adopt a new formula was submitted in both chambers of the General Assembly this year. But the General Assembly declined to begin the rewriting process before the 2026 session ended June 11.
Instead, lawmakers created a special legislative commission to further study the Blue Ribbon proposal’s feasibility. The 16-member group is set to hold its first meeting no later than Oct. 31, followed by an interim report on March 2, 2027, and a final report by Sept. 1, 2027.
In a recent phone interview, Ciccilline acknowledged he had anticipated the Blue Ribbon’s work would span multiple years.
“Secretly, I was always hoping I would be surprised it would move really quickly, but as a practical matter, I knew that was not the case,” he said.
Separately from the new study commission, the fiscal year 2027 state budget also instructs the R.I. Department of Education and state budget officials to recalculate the Blue Ribbon group’s proposed numbers with updated data from fiscal year 2025. The RIDE report is due Oct. 1, and needs to include comparisons that model how much the state would contribute to local school systems under different percentages. It will also dive into the ways special education and career and technical education should factor into the formula.
Released in January, the Blue Ribbon commission’s 63-page report determines a baseline for how much municipalities should contribute to their school districts – to relieve districts that might be paying too much and reconsider districts that might not be paying enough.
It offers two funding formula scenarios. One would maintain the state’s current share of total education spending at its current level of about 38%, in the commission’s estimate, while also expanding the formula to include more of the actual costs of operating schools and transporting students. This model would see an increase in the costs districts would have to shoulder, which would vary by district but total about $300 million statewide.
The commission’s second and preferred tactic: The state would up its share of total education spending from roughly 38% to 58%, an increase that has the state assuming new obligations for transportation, pensions and special education.
That would translate to an estimated $590 million annual increase in the state education budget, from around $1.57 billion to $2.16 billion, while municipalities would see collective savings of around $280 million.
The increase is better understood piecemeal, Cicilline said.
“It is not radically different from the level of increased education funding over the last three to five years,” he said, adding the General Assembly would likely need to phase in the formula increases over time.
In the state budgets for fiscal years 2025 and 2026, for example, total education aid grew by $71 million and $59 million, respectively.
Some districts would benefit from more state aid: Providence, for instance, could see a projected $186 million boost in state aid under the commission’s preferred model, with a possible increase of more than $63 million for Pawtucket.
But four districts could see a decline in state formula aid under the 58% scenario. Formula aid comprises the majority of state spending on local school districts and is assigned through a specially weighted mathematical formula meant to cover core instructional costs while also attempting to compensate for poverty and economic disadvantages in some communities.
Unlike formula funds, categorical funds – like transportation, special education, and career and technical education – are approved annually through the state’s budgeting process, meaning municipalities cannot rely on them as predictably from year to year.
The Blue Ribbon Commission’s proposed formula would fold in more of these categorical funds into its broader funding framework. But even then, some communities could see a decrease in formula-based aid: Newport could lose about $7.8 million, Westerly around $1.3 million and Middletown approximately $400,000.
Chariho – which serves around 2,966 students from Charlestown, Hopkinton and Richmond – could lose around $7.7 million in annual state education formula aid under the Blue Ribbon team’s 58% funding scenario.
Richmond Town Councilor Michael Colasante successfully secured his fellow councilors’ support at their May 5 meeting to invite Cicilline to explain the formula in more detail.
At the time, Colasante said he had read the Blue Ribbon report three times. When finished, he said, “I’ve got good blood pressure, but when I’m done, my wife puts a cuff on me … I’m off the charts. I mean, this is ridiculous. $7.7 million, they want to take away from Chariho, and they want to give it to Woonsocket, Providence, Pawtucket.
Cicilline accepted that invitation and appeared before the Richmond Town Council on June 16 to present the Blue Ribbon panel’s side of the story. He told Richmond councilors that the commission did not recommend a final state funding level, and that the report’s scenarios are options, not finalities, for lawmakers to consider implementing.
“What we’ve said to the General Assembly is you’re going to have to have a transition plan that takes that into account,” Cicilline told the council. He floated the idea of “a separate fund” the state could create to help municipalities with the transition.
But Richmond officials had more particular concerns. Chariho is the only regionalized district among the four districts with projected formula aid reductions under the preferred 58% scenario. It is also rural and vast, covering 128 square miles.
Councilor Mark Reynolds told Cicilline that he appreciated the new formula’s attempt at making municipal costs predictable. But it did not adequately address Chariho’s hefty $3 million transportation budget.
“You can’t run a regular-sized school bus down every road in these three towns,” Reynolds said, describing the smaller buses, longer routes and additional travel time needed to get the district’s students to school.
The new formula would ditch the current means of how the state calculates local contributions: An average called a quadratic mean which combines local property values and poverty concentration in a given community.
According to the Blue Ribbon Commission, no other state’s education formula uses a quadratic mean. It wants to see municipalities’ required local contributions based on property values alone.
That’s why, even under the 58% state share scenario, a community like Newport would see a nearly threefold increase in a required minimum local contribution, from $15.5 million to $42.2 million, to better reflect the value of its real estate.
Yet even Newport Superintendent Colleen Burns Jermain backed the Blue Ribbon recommendations in a Senate testimony from May, when the bill which would have instituted the proposed overhaul was heard in the chamber’s Committee on Finance.
“The present funding system formula and process,” Jermain wrote, is “unpredictable with a quadratic formula no one fully understands … This proposed legislation offers a path forward.”
But how would the local contribution math work out in Chariho, Reynolds wondered? Coastal Charlestown, for instance, only contributes about 24% of the district’s students, but its properties are also valued much higher than those in Hopkinton or Richmond.
Accompanying Cicilline to Richmond was Brenda Santos of Brown University’s Annenberg Institute, which worked with the Blue Ribbon panel and helped prepare its final report. Santos said at the meeting that the report’s aid figures did not account for all the expenses districts would no longer be responsible for.
“It’s not as severe as it appears when you just look at those columns at the end of the report,” Santos said, adding that a greater portion of transportation, special education and retired teachers’ pension costs would become the state’s obligation under the new formula.
Still, Santos acknowledged the commission’s numbers were based on publicly available 2024 data, and were limited in that they “do not account for the nuances of cost sharing within regional districts.”
“If you look at Chariho as one district, you have the magic problem that the quadratic mean was kind of disguising,” Santos said. “It was smoothing it over, and it was privileging districts or discounting districts, to be crude about it, where there was high wealth and high poverty.”
It’s now up to the legislative study commission, she said, to figure out what the proposal could mean for individual towns within a regional district, and to do “a much more precise job” of crunching the numbers.
Cicilline said the commission’s report never recommended a concrete, specific value for state formula aid to local school districts.
“The difference is you’ll be increasing education funding and distributing it through a formula that’s fair and equitable, and ensure that every student in Rhode Island has access to what they need to be successful.”
But Sen. Hanna Gallo, the Cranston Democrat who introduced both the new formula bill and the successful study commission resolution, said lawmakers ran out of time to review a report that took over a year to complete.
“I don’t know if they want to spend another $600 million annually on K-12 education,” Gallo said. “We have to make sure that we’re spending the money wisely and that it’s addressing the needs of the students that we have now.”
“I don’t see it as a delay,” she added. “I think we’re doing due diligence.”
The Blue Ribbon Commission included a wide array of stakeholders, with advocates for charter schools, teachers’ unions, superintendents, school principals, municipalities, education researchers and community advocates all represented on the panel.
But that diverse group’s general consensus did not blunt the legislature’s hesitance to enlarge the state budget in the way the Blue Ribbon report suggested.
The special resolution gives lawmakers time to craft a transition plan up to five years long that will help specify “annual adjustments to state and municipal shares to achieve full implementation” of the report’s recommendations.
Nora Gordon, a Georgetown University professor who co-chaired the Blue Ribbon Commission with Cicilline, said in a June 17 email that the new formula’s “primary challenges” lie in the “political and fiscal” rather than its technical implementation.
“If you don’t pump in new money, or have a very long phase-in period, any formula changes produce winners and losers,” Gordon said. “It’s not technically hard to predict those winners and losers,” she continued, “but it’s politically hard to fight concentrated interests for a system overhaul that benefits the state as a whole — especially kids who don’t vote.”
Marcela Betancur, president of the Latino Policy Institute and a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission, said she had concerns about the commission-studying commission at the State House.
“As someone who has to deal with the State House on many levels, I knew that it was going to be an uphill battle, and I think that’s something that myself and others that do policy voiced a lot,” Betancur said in a phone interview.
“We can see this in so many pieces of legislation that they’ve already done — they will always find a reason that it’s not feasible, that it’s too expensive,” Betancur added. “Because it is, it is really expensive. But the divestment in education that we have made for decades has already cost us millions of dollars and so I don’t know why we’re waiting so much longer.”
Did Cicilline think his political experience and connections would help expedite, or impede, the process?
“I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, I hope that my relationships that I have built with members of the General Assembly on both sides of the aisle over a long period of time, will help advance this legislation.”
He was more resolute before the Richmond Town Council in explaining why the state cannot continue “increasing spending through a formula that’s broken.”
“You can’t have a statewide school funding system that is fair to everyone – that’s equitable, that covers all costs of education, so that every student, no matter where they live, is treated the same, and every taxpayer treated the same – and build into inequities that exist today,” Ciciiline said. “You either have a system that’s fair to everyone, or you don’t.”
Alexander Castro is a staff writer for the Rhode Island Current.
