School funding plans go awry

By Thomas D. Elias

Gov. Jerry Brown and a lot of public school officials are just now discovering that the the new school funding formula Brown aggressively pushed last year is at risk of going awry.

The plan was to give a greater portion of new money raised via the 2012 Proposition 30 tax increases to schools with the highest percentages of English-language-learner students, foster children and pupils from poverty-ridden homes.

Essentially, Brown wants to finish the job begun in 1971 by the Serrano v. Priest decision of the state Supreme Court, which directs most funds from newly-approved property tax levies to the poorest districts.

“Equal treatment for children in unequal situations is not justice,” Brown said, as he proposed giving districts with high concentrations of needy children as much as $5,000 a year more than wealthier districts for each such student they have. The grants would start lower and escalate over several years, the money being added to the state’s base grant of $6,800 per year per child.

Officials of many better-heeled districts protested, suggesting the Brown proposal left out students from poverty-level homes who attend their schools. They provided numbers showing that districts in some generally well-to-do areas educate many disadvantaged students, even if their numbers don’t come up to the levels required to get the extra state money.

Those districts pushed for giving schools money based on the actual number of disadvantaged students they serve, rather than creating a threshold percentage schools must pass before getting extra money.

Their objections resulted in some change in the plan, with the extra money now being passed to districts on the basis of numbers at individual schools, rather than district-wide enrollments, an alteration made by the Legislature in June.

Known as the Local Control Funding Formula, the new rules also give districts more control over how they spend state money they receive.

But the plan isn’t working quite as Brown and school administrators hoped. Yes, districts are getting extra money for low-income pupils, English-learners and foster children, initially about $2,800 per student.

But many districts aren’t getting all the money they expected because too many families have still not turned in verification forms attesting to their income. And the state isn’t handing over money for students whose forms are not yet in, saying they need proof those students actually exist or are truly needy.

Districts, meanwhile, complain they already verify students’ family income every four years to get federal funds for subsidized lunches. Doing it again costs them time and money, they gripe.

The Los Angeles Unified district, for example, had only about 40 percent of the required forms returned as of mid-December, with about $200 million at stake in the missing paperwork. In Fresno, hundreds of families were refusing to fill out forms, possibly worried about immigration problems.

If the problem persists, and the state is left with undistributed cash, it should be divided among all schools on the basis of their federal lunch-money reports. Then, poor kids going to school with children of the wealthy will benefit far more than under the current formula.