Necessary school funding

Almost as soon as lawmakers began this session in January and looked at the expected shortfall in revenue, they agreed that Gov. Angus King’s plan to increase k-12 school funding by 5 percent was the best that could be done. Since then, the debate in the Education Committee has been over the so-called cushion, the amount of money set aside to ease losses to school districts in the event formula or, perhaps, enrollment changes would otherwise cause funding to be lost.

If this sounds like mere housekeeping, it isn’t. The amount being discussed could be as much as $5 million. The governor’s plan included $2 million for a cushion within the 5 percent increase, and effectively cutting the increase to 4.7 percent; the committee is considering another $3 million outside the 5 percent. With the high level of expenses already included in this year’s General Purpose Aid to Education, any help lawmakers can give GPA to make it go further would be welcome.

The committee and the King administration already seem to agree on some restrictions for using the cushion. For instance, districts would have to spend at least 8.3 mills and have fiscal capacity less than twice the state average. Those are generous limits and should remain in the legislation. The disagreement currently is over whether the cushion affects schools hurt financially by the formula only or whether loss in enrollment should also count.

Dropping enrollment for a school in a year of lower-than-expected increases can make a situation dire. The cushion, however, is the sort of governing mechanism used when political expediency is required for lawmakers to agree on anything. Either it exists into perpetuity or it sets schools up for large falls later on by masking lesser pain now. Clearly, keeping it robust to hold a political coalition together but modest enough to keep schools from falling off financial cliffs is in everyone’s interest.

The Legislature in the last few years has been able to partly offset the need for a cushion by making larger overall increases in GPA. If that is stopping now, the option is not to pretend that more money is around corner for losing schools but to ease them toward the new funding level. The way to do that is to agree that GPA should be actually 5 percent, with the added $3 million on top of that. Formula losses should be cushioned as contemplated and demographic losses cushioned at a lesser level, say half the formula-loss level, with an expectation that they will not exist in a couple of years.

It’s a compromise that will satisfy neither those who want enrollment changes counted fully nor those who want them counted not at all. But when the money is tight and no lawmaker is willing to insist that GPA be expanded, it is the kind of compromise that is necessary.