Committee debates tuition language in H.454 and whether "money follows the student"

Legislative counsel and committee staff on April 29 walked senators through proposed tuition language in H.454 that would change how sending districts pay receiving schools for tuition students and prompted a lengthy debate over whether weighted dollars should follow individual students.

Under the language presented, tuition paid by the resident district to a receiving school would be the base multiplied by a "tuition factor" equal to 1 plus the sum of all weights except a separately calculated economic‑disadvantage component. That economic‑disadvantage component was described in the draft as the economic‑disadvantage weight multiplied by the economic‑disadvantage composition of the sending district — in effect allocating the economic‑disadvantage dollars by the sending…