State superintendent Debbie Critchfield’s “modest” budget proposal for next fiscal year wouldn’t give public schools a significant boost in funding, as they’ve seen in recent years. 

But if lawmakers approve the budget next legislative session, it could have a “big impact” for school districts and charter schools struggling to address the particular needs of their students, Critchfield told Idaho Education News in a recent interview. 

Critchfield, a Republican in her first term as superintendent, spoke with EdNews about her reasoning behind the $3.29 billion spending plan she sent to the governor on Sep. 1. 

The centerpiece of the budget proposal is a funding formula change that would provide schools with more money for students who are more expensive to educate. The weighted formula would give each school district and charter school a base amount of funding per student plus additional money based on weights for special education students, English-language learners and other students with unique characteristics. 

The change wouldn’t completely overhaul the state’s dated public school funding formula, as school leaders have long called for. But it would modernize the way schools get discretionary funding, altogether $432.1 million, or about 13% of the overall budget. 

That should ease one of the major shortfalls pinching local school budgets — an estimated $80 million gap in special education funding — while still giving school leaders control over where they target spending.  

“It’s about how we distribute the money for the types of students that are in our classrooms,” she said. “That’s going to have a big impact for our districts and charters.”

Meanwhile, the overall budget would increase public school spending by just 2.6%, and that accounts for fiscal and political realities. State tax revenues have cooled off since mega surpluses in recent years supported a 56.5% increase in public school spending since 2020. Now, state lawmakers are wondering when enough will be enough to appease public schools, Critchfield said. 

“We don’t have to add a ton of new money to the budget,” she said. “Let’s send it out in a better way.”

Why are the weights needed? 

Idaho’s current funding formula, last rewritten in 1994, doesn’t provide adequate money for school districts to cover higher-cost students. 

This is most clearly seen in the service of Idaho’s 37,000 special education students. Public schools are required by federal law to provide all students, including those with a disability, with a free appropriate public education. And the training, equipment and transportation needed for special education students comes at a much higher cost than educating other students. 

Schools have to find the money for those expenses when federal and state dollars fall short. EdNews reported last year that the funding shortfall for special education was $66.5 million, but Critchfield told the State Board of Education last month that the gap is now about $80 million. 

Districts and charters are in a similar bind with other types of students, such as English language learners and students requiring literacy interventions. Critchfield’s budget proposal would add weights to account for these funding disparities. 

“Districts will be able to use their dollars for the types of students that they have,” Critchfield said. 

The Idaho School Boards Association, an advocacy group made up of school trustees, will soon consider a resolution that supports Critchfield’s proposal. The Cassia School District — where Critchfield previously served as a trustee — submitted the resolution to the ISBA for consideration at its annual conference in November. 

The resolution urges the Legislature to regularly adjust the state’s funding formula “to reflect the actual costs of providing high-quality education to all student populations.”

How would the weighted formula work? 

The formula would give districts and charters a base amount of discretionary funding per student, plus multipliers for certain characteristics. Here are the proposed multipliers for each student: 

• Special education student: base amount x 2
• English language learner: base amount x .25
• Economically disadvantaged: base amount x .25
• Attending a small school: base amount x .25
• Gifted and talented: base amount x .25
• At-risk, attending an alternative school: base amount x 1

If a school district gets a base amount of $1,000 per student, for example, the proposed formula would generate $3,000 for a special education student, $2,000 for an at-risk student and $1,250 for an English language learner. 

The formula would only apply to discretionary funding, and Critchfield said she’s not interested in applying the weighted formula to other areas of the budget, such as health insurance, teacher pay or transportation. 

“It’s not a completely new funding formula, but a better, more efficient and effective way to distribute the dollars,” she said.

Critchfield’s budget also would set aside $3 million for a new “special needs student fund.” Districts would be able to apply for the funds to cover additional costs associated with educating students with disabilities.  

Would there be winners and losers? 

The weighted formula should make most school leaders feel like they’re getting more money, even without a significant hike in state spending, Critchfield said. 

Her proposal adds $57.6 million to the discretionary budget, $24.4 million of which is new spending. The other $33.2 million comes from existing funds that would be collapsed into the discretionary account. 

However, districts and charter schools with a small ratio of students assigned weights could get less money than they currently do. Last time Critchfield proposed a weighted formula, fewer than a dozen charter schools were on the losing end, she said. 

“It was simply because they didn’t have the students,” Critchfield said. “There’s a lot of factors and a lot of math that we can do around weighting different characteristics, but if you don’t have the students, that part we can’t help you with.”

The previous proposal — House Bill 718 — surfaced in the waning weeks of this year’s legislative session. The bill quietly died without a hearing, and its failure was credited, in part, to the harm it would have caused an unlucky few charters. 

The Idaho Department of Education doesn’t yet have a data set showing how much each district and charter school would get from the current proposal, said Scott Graf, the IDE’s communications director. But that spreadsheet will be coveted once it’s available, particularly by lawmakers who want to know the bottom line for their home districts. 

Critchfield said she’s even more determined to enact the formula change heading into the state’s next budget cycle. And she’s already made a trade-off to prioritize the weighted formula. She won’t renew her request from last legislative session for an additional $40 million tied to achievement in math. Critchfield said her top priority is the weights, and she doesn’t want it brushed aside in favor of something else. 

“I believe in it as strongly as I did last session — in fact, more so now,” she said.