A Republican bill which seeks to intimidate school districts from continuing their lawsuit against the state foundation formula while blaming certain districts for not having adequate local effort gained first-round approval by the Missouri Senate Tuesday afternoon.
“This is a strong-arm tactic by Sen. Gary Nodler (R-Joplin) and the GOP to legislate their way out of the adequate funding lawsuit,” said Sen. Yvonne Wilson (D-Kansas City). “It is also an admission that they have not been able to establish a fully adequate formula, and they seek to blame the shortcomings on certain school districts.”
Wilson, a lifelong educator, noted that it is ironic that last year’s new formula sought to move away from the levy-driven formula established in 1993 to a student need-driven formula, yet the Nodler proposal wants to assess blame to districts which do not meet the performance levy requirement of $3.43 per $100 assessed valuation. The current formula is $800 million underfunded, according to state education officials.
The GOP proposal stipulates that a school district which levies an operating levy that is less than the $3.43 performance levy must provide written notice to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education asserting that the district is providing and adequate education to its students. If the district asserts that it is not providing an adequate education, that inadequacy would be deemed a result of insufficient local effort. Special education school districts would be exempted.
Wilson said, “This bullying bill shoves superintendents into the task of acknowledging their educational failure or the local failure of adequate funding, when in reality it is the state which has failed to provide adequate educational funding.”