DENVER — During his State of the State speech, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis touted education and the "new school finance formula," but is pitching a change to a piece of the formula.
The new formula is expected to start rolling out for the 2025-2026 school year and as of Tuesday is planned to be fully implemented in six years. It comes from HB 24-1448, which was signed into law last year, with the formula being laid out over 85 pages. The current school finance formula was first utilized in 1994, something that has been used for too long according to District 38 Chief Business Officer Brett Ridgway.
"When you have a statistically based financial model, it's going to degrade over time," Ridgway explained. "Pretty much every 10 years or so, you need to do a full rewrite. The fact that we reached 30 years with that, and combined with all the changes that have happened in education, we were long, long overdue. And so this was a good change, and we need to continue down that path."
The Governor's Office amended its budget proposal earlier this month increasing funding by $35 million, for a total increase of $150 million, to fulfill the updated student-focused school finance formula and implement 18% of the formula in the first year. In November Polis wanted to roll the new formula out in seven years but changed the rollout period to match the original plan to six years earlier this month.
The old school formula used a five-year average for student count to dictate funding, the new formula is intended to use a four-year average for pupil count. The governor’s latest proposal would utilize a single-year count, which would hurt school districts that experienced declining enrollment recently. The governor's office references "phantom students" as their reason for going to a single-year pupil count, meaning they believe money is going to empty seats under the four-year average. It is up to the Joint Budget Committee to decide if they agree with the latest proposal from Polis, but the pupil count is only a piece of the new formula.
To better understand the new formula, News5 spoke in-depth with Ridgway about what the purpose is and what is different.
"The thing I think I'd say about the new formula is it is much more student-centered, student-centric," Ridgway added. "That was a priority for folks to shift away from something that focused on the district or the geography and what do the students need? So much has changed in education in the last 30 years since that last formula was adopted. And so we understand more about how students learn, what resources they need, and really on a student-by-student basis, and so we can deliver resources that individual students need. This new formula really starts to recognize that, especially with special education and English language learning and students in poverty. We understand more than we did then about what challenges that brings to education, to the learning environment for each student, and so more resources, better resources, can be delivered to each individual student to help them in their pursuit of education and learning."
Switching from the five-year pupil count average to the four-year is something Ridgway sees as a benefit to many schools, but it still isn't clear if the JBC will go with a one-year average that Polis has proposed.
"What it really is doing is taking school districts that are experiencing population decline and trying to provide them some soft landing," Ridgway said of the new formula averaging four years. "So there's some benefit to that. But I think the conversation is, well, how much time, how much soft landing runway is appropriate to that?"
The formula itself is complex, but a breakdown of how funding is dispersed can be viewed at the bottom of this article. Ridgway and others will have to wait until March to get a clearer picture of how their school district's budget will look when the state revenue forecast is released, with final clarity in about May.
"It becomes really an exercise of reading some tea leaves and seeing, what are we hearing," Ridgway said of planning the budget for District 38. "What are we seeing? Having good conversations, having good information from informal conversations ,that actually is a good resource for us to say, Okay, here's where we want to start in terms of our budgeting assumptions while we wait for that greater clarity that now doesn't come until we're close to the end of the school year and close to the end of the fiscal year, which starts on July 1."
You can watch the full interview with Ridgway at the top of this article.
A breakdown of the new school formula is below:
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