House Ways & Means hears breakdown of governor’s proposed $13,200 school funding base

A Joint Fiscal Office analyst briefed the House Ways & Means joint assembly on Feb. 20 on the administration’s proposed school funding “foundation formula,” describing how the administration and its contractors calculated a $13,200 base amount per average daily membership (ADM) before weights and block grants.

Ezra Holban, a fiscal analyst with the nonpartisan Joint Fiscal Office, told the committee the presentation summarized material the administration and consultants provided and stressed that “this is not Ezra’s proposal. This is not the Joint Fiscal Office’s proposal. This is the administration’s proposal.” He described the base as a modified PICUS evidence‑based model refined by a contractor the presentation identified as APA.

The administration’s model starts from prototypical schools and a prototypical district and then assigns staffing ratios and per-pupil nonstaff units. Holban said APA’s adjustments to PICUS include adding $5,000 to the statewide average teacher salary used in the model and doubling the number of mental‑health FTEs the PICUS model identified. Holban said the Agency of Education provided the 2024 estimate of statewide average teacher salary that PICUS used as a starting point; APA then increased that average by $5,000 and the administration model applies a 36.1% benefit load to reach a unit compensation cost.

Holban said the prototypical district used in the analysis contains 3,900 students spread across eight schools: four elementary schools (450 pupils each), two middle schools (450 pupils each) and two high schools (600 pupils each). That prototype produces the administration’s base calculation after APA’s staffing and nonstaff changes and an inflation adjustment, Holban said. He also cited a long‑term ADM total used in the administration’s modeling of roughly 83,368 pupils statewide.

Major APA adjustments Holban described include: - A $5,000 increase to the average statewide teacher salary used in unit cost calculations, with benefits factored at 36.1%. - Increasing the share of elective teachers in middle school from PICUS’s 20% to 33% of core teachers. - Doubling the mental‑health professional staffing identified by PICUS (Holban said APA changed a PICUS figure of 1.8 FTEs to 3.6 FTEs for a prototypical school). - Adding assistant principals at the elementary and middle levels (APA included 1 FTE assistant principal at those levels where PICUS had not). - Adding two college-and-career‑readiness instructor positions in prototypical high schools. - Including an in‑school career and technical education (CTE) line: Holban said APA’s model includes $25 per middle‑school pupil and $50 per high‑school pupil for in‑school CTE equipment and supplies, separate from funding that would flow to consolidated CTE districts under the proposed structure. - Adding a flexible‑pathways allocation at the high‑school level (Holban cited $345 per high‑school pupil).

Holban also summarized PICUS’s technology assumptions and how APA treated them: the underlying PICUS line items allocate hardware, software and network equipment at per‑pupil unit costs (Holban listed components that sum to about $250 per pupil, including roughly $74 for computer hardware, $69 for software, $55 for network equipment/printers and $52 for other instructional hardware/software). Holban said PICUS uses a 3:1 student‑to‑computer ratio in its base calculation and noted PICUS has modeled a $350 per‑pupil figure where a district wanted a 1:1 device ratio.

Lawmakers pressed Holban and raised concerns during the session. Representative Odey asked who supplied the initial average teacher salary; Holban said the Agency of Education provided the 2024 estimate PICUS used and APA then added $5,000. Representative Oswald asked for clarification on the mental‑health ratio; Holban said APA had doubled PICUS’s identified level (example: 1.8 → 3.6 FTEs). Representative Nelson and others said financing questions — how the state would pay for the proposed changes — are matters for the administration and Appropriations work; Holban said the Joint Fiscal Office was presenting the administration’s methodology and that specific financing questions should be directed to the administration.

Members also flagged methodological concerns. One lawmaker raised that the evidence‑based model is typically paired with a professional judgment panel and said the administration’s contractors did not use such a panel; that omission drew explicit concern. Legislators repeatedly asked how the prototypical assumptions would scale if the state adopted a different district configuration (for example, if the state kept more or fewer supervisory unions or created five versus a larger number of districts). Holban said the $13,200 figure is built from the 3,900‑student prototype and that the administration would need to explain how it would scale the model for different district configurations.

Holban walked through school‑level and district‑level aggregates in the APA‑adjusted version of the PICUS model: he cited a per‑pupil staffing cost figure for a prototypical elementary school (about $10,163 in the presentation), a lower staff cost per pupil at a prototypical middle school and a different mix at a prototypical 600‑pupil high school (Holban gave a high‑school staffing cost of roughly $8,865 per pupil and resource totals that produced larger per‑pupil totals at the high‑school level when flexible pathways and CTE were included). He described central‑office staffing and district maintenance and operations calculations and noted the model assigns some district‑level service staff (for example, computer technicians and psychologists) to a central office and then spreads those costs across the prototypical district.

Holban repeatedly emphasized the Joint Fiscal Office’s role as analyst — “we are a nonpartisan legislative office dedicated to producing unbiased fiscal analysis” — and said the presentation’s role was to explain how the administration reached its numbers, not to recommend policy. Committee members asked Holban to request additional clarifications from the administration (for example, what exactly was included in the $68,000 average salary number used as a starting point and why the presentation applied a 36.1% benefit rate).

The committee paused the briefing with more of the presentation left to cover and asked Holban to return to complete the material on a future date and to carry forward members’ requests for more detail. No formal legislative action or vote occurred during the session.