How weightings feed Kansas's school finance: base aid times weighted FTE

Reviser Jason Long told the Education Funding Task Force that Kansas's state foundation aid is calculated by multiplying the statutorily defined base aid for student excellence by a district's weighted full-time-equivalent enrollment.

The memo explains why the weighting decisions matter: "The weightings are just factors, that are applied either to the whole FTE enrollment or a portion of a school district's FTE enrollment to account for certain student demographics and the costs associated with providing education for those students," Long said.

Why it matters: the weighted-FTE step sits between local and state funding. A higher weighting increases total foundation aid for a district; local foundation aid (local revenue offsets, nonresident payments, special education and catastrophic aid) is then subtracted to arrive at the state's portion. That means changes to weightings or the base can increase or decrease the state's payment and change districts' local option budget authority.

Long and staff emphasized the formula's interconnected gears: a tweak to a weighting or the base can alter total foundation aid, which affects the state's share and related calculations such as the computed local option budget and supplemental state aid. "Every facet of the school finance formula is connected," Long said; "I think of it as just a series of gears, and I make a tweak to this 1, it's gonna rotate through the formula, and you're gonna potentially have implications on other aspects of funding for school districts as a result."

Task force members used that framing to evaluate concrete modeling runs. Staff cautioned that some modeling choices (for example, removing a weighting and simply rolling that money into the base) change the mix of who benefits: small districts with heavy low-enrollment weightings can lose in some roll-into-base scenarios, while large districts may gain because they receive a share of the newly centralized dollars.

Discussion and context: members asked for historical and trend detail (enrollment pre-/post-COVID, head count vs. FTE, and how qualifying populations changed). KLRD said it can provide long-run tables and 11x17 charts showing weighted-FTE and base aid from the 1990s through 2024 and can run alternative scenarios on request. Staff also noted that some changes in weightings were tied to court and legislative actions (including Montoya-era adjustments and later Gannon-related changes), and that large reconfigurations are often enacted inside broader school-finance bills.

Ending: The task force agreed to continue the modeling work with attention to trade-offs (who gains, who loses, and how changes intersect with local option budget authority and supplemental programs) before making policy recommendations.