Since 2011, West Virginia has shuttered 139 public schools, and this looks to be another tough financial year.
In June, state school board President Paul Hardesty warned that 10 to 20 more schools could close this year. Just this month, the West Virginia State School Board announced a partial takeover of Harrison County Public Schools, and an extension of its takeover for Roane County.
During this year’s legislative session, lawmakers promised to fix the state’s school funding formula, but when it ended, the state had nothing to show for it.
Again and again, experts, teachers and politicians keep pointing to the same issue: the state’s funding formula no longer works.
Here’s the problem and what lawmakers can do about it:
How does the state’s funding formula work now?
Public schools are funded through three sources of money: local property taxes, the federal government and state tax dollars.
State monies are calculated through an equation that takes into account the cost of payroll for teachers and support staff, as well as fixed costs like HVAC and water and bus fleet maintenance.
The bedrock of the formula is student enrollment. Each Oct. 1, all 55 county school systems take a headcount, and that number determines the staff and teachers required for the kids in that school system.
The student enrollment is also used to calculate funding for buses and school building maintenance. Counties where students are more spread out receive more money for transportation costs than those where the student population is highly concentrated. Building costs are calculated based in part on the number of students per square foot of a school building.
School enrollment has decreased by about 30,000 students since 2019. The decline is a result of people moving away for better opportunities, an aging population and students leaving public schools to enroll in the Hope Scholarship program.
Few schools in the state are spared. But while the decline reduces funding, the cost of educating kids changes little.
For instance, a loss of 25 students, a typical classroom, is usually broken up over multiple grades and maybe even multiple county schools. Therefore, it’s hard to eliminate one teaching position, because that teacher is still needed for the children who remain in the system.
Why does the formula not address school needs
During COVID, the state’s 55 county school districts received more than $1 billion in additional funding from the federal government. Since that time, they have used some of those funds to cover reductions in funding in order to keep school buildings open and teachers in the classroom.
Now, the money has run out.
Since January, when Hancock County Schools announced they would not make payroll, Hardesty has warned districts will be falling off “the COVID cliff” and be forced to make cuts.
As counties struggle with thin budgets, school districts are seeing an increase in special education students, who require more resources to teach.
While the state and federal governments are supposed to provide additional dollars for special education students, it isn’t enough.
Uriah Cummings, the chief financial officer for the West Virginia Department of Education, estimated there’s a $180 million statewide shortfall for special education.
And for rural districts that didn’t have large student enrollments to begin with, the funding formula provides additional challenges.
West Virginia is ranked as one of the most rural states east of the Mississippi. Rural areas often lack population density and with that, property taxes to help pay for schools. The cost to run a school building and utilities barely changes with a decrease in student population, but the funding formula also uses the number of students in a school to determine the amount the state will designate for these costs.
The state’s formula does establish a funding floor of 1,400 students.
However, only the district with the fewest students per square mile gets the full amount of that funding. Other counties with fewer than 1,400 students get a percentage of that funding in proportion to how their population compares to the least populated county.
So Wirt County, with roughly the same number of students enrolled, gets less than Pocahontas because it’s geographically a smaller county.
Over the years, small, rural schools are typically first on the chopping block for closure and consolidation, leading to longer bus rides.
How could a new formula address those challenges?
In mid-May, the House Education Committee heard from an array of school policy stakeholders, ranging from teachers to administrators to experts. Each had their own take on the fix required for the state funding formula.
Some wanted it thrown out and a new one drafted. Others wanted minor tweaks, targeting specific areas where the formula is deficient, primarily special education.
West Virginia is an outlier in its funding formula. While the state calculates school funding based on enrollment numbers, most states just send a lump sum out, calculated per-student, according to the Education Commission of the States.
In states where the funding is calculated per-student, they include extra amounts for children with special needs, from low-income backgrounds or who are learning English.
In January, lawmakers in the House learned all of this in a report compiled by the RAND Corporation. That report recommended weighting funding for, at least, special education and low-income students. Additionally, weighting could also be used for low-density, rural school districts.
That will cost more money. How would the state pay for that?
The state’s current school funding formula is a set-and-forget affair, the budgetary equivalent of a crockpot. The Department of Education runs the calculation based on the current formula and submits it to the Governor for inclusion in the budget bill.
General revenue monies, such as sales tax, personal income tax, severance tax, corporate tax and tobacco tax, pay for it.
The amount of additional money needed would depend on specific changes to the formula. In the RAND study, consultants laid out a menu of options for targeting specific populations, like special education and children in poverty. But the study didn’t specifically address school closures and costs to counties with sparse populations.
State lawmakers have a wide range of options to get extra funding to schools. They could roll back personal income tax cuts, which have led to a $600 million decrease in revenue since 2019, according to Sean O’Leary, a budget analyst with the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy.
Other ways to raise money could include restoring the corporate net income tax to 9%, raising the tobacco tax and unhooking tax deductions from the federal government, O’Leary said.
Governor Patrick Morrisey recently announced a budget surplus of $370 million.
However, only $245 million of that money was earmarked in the event of a surplus, leaving $125 million on the table.
The governor’s spokesman Lars Dalseide did not say if Morrisey would be open to calling a special session to fix the formula, or recommending lawmakers use the $125 million left in this year’s surplus to shore up public education.
“At this time, no decisions regarding a special session or any specific funding proposals have been made,” Dalseide said.
The West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy recently reviewed the closure documents for 14 closing schools and found it would take $28 million to keep them open another year.
