Task force reviews LegalMax and the school funding "weightings" that drive Kansas foundation aid

The Special Education and Related Services Funding Task Force on Monday received a technical briefing on LegalMax and the set of statutory "weightings" used to calculate Kansas state foundation aid, with staff and education officials laying out how each weighting is computed and asking the panel for direction on additional data the legislature might request.

Task force members were shown how the Kansas State Department of Education's LegalMax spreadsheets combine base aid and total weighted full-time-equivalent (FTE) enrollment to produce each district's foundation aid. KLRD fiscal analyst Jennifer Light told the panel that base aid for fiscal year 2024 is adjusted by the three-year average change in the CPI-U Midwest and that the LegalMax file is a "living document" that is revised after district audits are completed.

The discussion matters because the weightings — statutory multipliers or formulas added to a district's regular FTE — increase state aid when districts serve students or operate programs that typically cost more. KLRD staff and KSDE advisers emphasized that a single student can generate FTE in multiple weightings (for example, an at-risk student who also receives special education and CTE services), so total weighted FTE commonly exceeds headcount.

KLRD and KSDE staff walked the task force through the major weightings the committee said it will study further: at-risk and high-density at-risk, bilingual, special education (flagged for a deep follow-up meeting), career and technical education (CTE), transportation, low- and high-enrollment adjustments, ancillary school facilities, and the cost-of-living (COLA) weighting. Staff summarized the statutory calculations and practical issues that can make outputs differ substantially from local experience.

KLRD senior analyst Matthew Willis summarized the at-risk and high-density at-risk weightings and the practical implications staff identified: the at-risk weighting is generated from the count of students eligible for the federal free-lunch program multiplied by a weighting factor (0.484 in current calculations), while the high-density at-risk weighting applies additional formula steps at either the district or building level. Willis explained how districts take the higher of district-level or building-level calculations and noted the high-density thresholds (no high-density weighting below 35% at-risk concentration; a sliding calculation for 35%—6.99% and a simpler multiplier for districts/buildings above 50%). Committee members and KSDE advisers flagged gaps in state reporting: districts report the number of students who are eligible for or served by at-risk programs on local consolidated plans at year-end, but that data is not published in LegalMax and has not historically been analyzed to track student-level entry, duration, or exit from services.

On bilingual weighting, Jennifer Light explained that Kansas uses whichever of two calculations yields a higher weighted FTE for a district: a contact-hours-based FTE (bilingual contact hours converted to FTE and multiplied by 0.395) or a headcount calculation (headcount multiplied by 0.185). KLRD reported that 156 districts used the headcount method and 48 used the contact-hours method in the most recent preliminary LegalMax.

Alaina Rudder (KLRD) described CTE weighting, which is computed by converting approved CTE contact minutes to FTE and multiplying by 0.5; KSDE approval of pathway programs determines program eligibility for the weighting. Nicole Fielder summarized ancillary school-facility and cost-of-living weightings; both are funded by local property tax levies that are remitted to the state and returned to the district via foundation aid. Ancillary levies may be permitted for recently opened new facilities and draw down on a statutory schedule (first-year cap 90% of the attributable tax-state foundation aid, then 75%, 60%, 45%, 30%, 15% and expire after six years under current law). The COLA weighting requires a district average appraised single-family residence value that exceeds a statutory threshold (staff noted the current statutory comparator uses a 15% threshold of the statewide average) and includes statutory multipliers and an indexed cap for the weighting calculation.

Transportation weighting drew repeated questions. Willis and KSDE staff described a stepwise statutory computation that produces a transportation funding amount (using density measures and a per-capita allowance table keyed to a district's density). That computed aid is then converted into a weighting by dividing the computed aid by base aid. A statutory 110% cap prevents a district from receiving more transportation state aid than 110% of its prior-year transportation expenditures; several districts are capped and therefore receive less state transportation aid than the formula alone would compute.

Committee members and staff repeatedly requested additional information before the task force's next meeting: multi-year time series showing how total weighted FTE has changed relative to headcount; district-level counts of students actually identified and served under at-risk criteria (including preschool-aged at-risk criteria defined in the School Equity and Enhancement Act); which districts levy the COLA-authority property tax and the amounts levied; and district transportation actual expenditures and the gap versus the formula-computed aid (including which districts are constrained by the 110% prior-year cap). Staff said they would provide the requested tables and statutory citations for the next meeting and schedule a separate, deeper session on special education funding.

The task force did not take votes or adopt policy at the session. Members emphasized the committee'level goal of simplifying and improving alignment between funding proxies (for example, free-lunch-derived at-risk funding) and the populations actually receiving services. Multiple superintendents and KSDE advisers told the panel that local identification of at-risk students routinely uses local assessments, behavioral and attendance measures, and professional judgment, and that teacher-level staff often do not know a student's free/reduced lunch status (free-lunch eligibility is used to generate funding, not to determine service eligibility).

Members closed by asking staff to prepare follow-up analyses, identifying the specific data pulls described above and to prepare a focused briefing on special education funding at the committee's next meeting.