Senate Education Committee hears seven recommendations to revamp funding review, teacher incentives and support services

Consultants presenting to the Senate Education Committee laid out seven priority recommendations aimed at sharpening the state’s school funding system and improving outcomes for high‑need students.

The presenters said the work draws on Department of Education and Bureau of Legislative Research (BLR) data, 15 case studies, national literature reviews and stakeholder surveys, and that the report they delivered today covers seven recommendations selected from a larger set of study activities. They emphasized that today’s session was for discussion only and that the full report will be presented at the committee’s next meeting for formal consideration.

At the top of the list, the consultants urged adopting a hybrid adequacy‑review cycle: keep the current two‑year BLR review while adding a larger, multi‑method re‑examination every six to ten years using at least two complementary approaches (for example, evidence‑based plus cost‑function or professional judgment). The presenters said the multi‑method approach would provide sensitivity to district size, regional cost differences and student‑characteristic adjustments for English learners, economically disadvantaged students and students with disabilities.

On the matrix itself, the team recommended reconsidering several discrete resource lines where evidence converges. They suggested smaller student‑to‑teacher ratios for kindergarten through third grade (the literature supports roughly a 13–17:1 range for core instruction), higher noncore staffing percentages in high schools (the evidence base often finds ~33 percent instead of the current 20 percent), more secretary and library media staff, an explicit assistant‑principal line rather than folding that role into an instructional‑facilitator bucket, clearer accounting and funding for student mental‑health services and school safety staff, and increased per‑student instructional‑materials funding (the presenters cited a benchmark of about $2.50 per pupil used in other adequacy studies).

The consultants also recommended creating an incentive structure to recruit and retain highly qualified teachers in high‑need and small rural districts, citing workforce data showing substantially lower shares of teachers with master’s degrees and modestly lower full‑certification rates in high‑need and smaller settings.

Another recommendation asked the legislature to form a task force to map out out‑of‑school factors that inhibit student performance—mental health, internet access, adult education, before/after‑school enrichment and other wraparound services—and to identify which services should remain in the K–12 funding box and which belong to other agencies.

Two of the more consequential finance proposals would reshape how targeted dollars flow: smooth and retarget the state’s ESA (economically disadvantaged student assistance) funding to reduce cliff effects and tie the ESA amount to the foundation so it grows proportionally with the model; and consider removing special‑education funding from the census‑based matrix in favor of a student‑level or multi‑weighted approach that better reflects service intensity and actual costs.

Presenters cited ADE data showing wide variation across districts in special‑education incidence (roughly 5 percent to over 30 percent) and per‑student special‑education expenditures that ranged from about $1,300 to as much as $15,000 in 2018–19. They said those differences argue for exploring a funding model that responds to actual service levels rather than a uniform census assumption.

Committee members raised questions about guardrails for ESA dollars, how to adjust the prototypical 500‑student model for very small districts, the tradeoffs rural teachers face (lower salaries but smaller class sizes), and the timeline for any structural change. Presenters repeatedly stressed this was a design and evidence conversation: they did not prescribe dollar levels today, but said the full report will include more detail and examples and that the committee should retain the two‑year review while adding periodic, deeper reviews.

No motions on the recommendations were made; the committee will receive the full report at the next meeting, with members given two weeks to digest it before the presenters return.