Legislators have tried to use the state’s school technology fund so often for so many other projects that even after the fund was approved this session it was unsurprising that a lawmaker proposed to lift $3.5 million from it to add to a “cushion” to General Purpose Aid to Education. The technology fund – laptop money – has been thoroughly debated, cut and reconfigured over the last two years. It shouldn’t be cut again. The GPA cushion, on the other hand, already is too high and should be eliminated entirely.

A cushion in the school-funding formula is added to keep schools that are losing state money under the formula from losing too badly. The added money cannot be justified through the formula’s standards of need but instead is distributed based on expectation – schools expect to receive a certain amount from the state and find themselves in trouble when their tax effort, enrollment levels or property valuations no longer trigger that amount. The cushion for next year is $4 million on a GPA budget of more than $700 million.

A cushion is a sign of failure. It means the formula or school districts or the Legislature did not properly account for education expenses and must rely on a temporary cash bridge to get through a rough spot. While $4 million might seem like a small amount compared with the GPA total, so many school costs are fixed that even small increases above the fixed costs are substantial. Unfortunately, instead of a temporary measure, the cushion is becoming a permanent feature of GPA, draining funds from the general formula and telling school districts that they do not need to make tax and spending adjustments to reflect their changed circumstances.

But if the cushion itself is a sign of failure, the annual demand for it might be telling lawmakers that they need to improve the formula, particularly when those losing out are schools with enrollment levels that do not leverage sufficient state dollars no matter how high the local effort. Maine is moving toward a new funding model, called Essential Programs and Services, that is in some respects better than the current method, but like the current formula, still bases its local shares on per-pupil expenditures.

The answer is not, as lawmakers are trying to do this year by taking the laptop money, to add to the cushion, but to differentiate within the new formula between those school districts that are small because of geographic isolation (not choice) and where local residents are making a substantial tax effort vs. school districts that merely have high local property valuation. The King administration currently is looking at the effect of fixed school costs on small schools and is expected to report on its findings next January.

That should give lawmakers enough time next year to devise a more thoughtful funding strategy than simply taking from one school account to pad another. And it should give legislators something to do besides thinking up ways to spend a technology fund that has yet to be given a chance to prove itself.