TACIR subcommittee: virtual school counts distort county fiscal capacity; staff recommends reporting student residence

Members of the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (TACIR) Education Finance Subcommittee heard staff findings that the way virtual-school students are recorded for average daily membership (ADM) can produce distortions in the state fiscal-capacity calculation and recommended the state collect each virtual student's county of residence.

TACIR Director Lippert summarized staff work and said the commission's fiscal-capacity model uses multiple linear regression to calculate per-pupil fiscal capacity and that virtual students affect several variables in the model. "These students can increase the host county service responsibility," Lippert said, which "can cause the fiscal capacity for the host county to go down," while in other cases including virtual students in the model "can increase the fiscal capacity of a county…