INDIANAPOLIS | School leaders from Merrillville and Crown Point asked a legislative panel Monday to make Indiana's school funding formula more equitable.
"School systems with comparable demographics should receive comparable funding," said Superintendent Tony Lux, of Merrillville Community School Corp.
The existing funding formula provides more money to schools based on their "complexity index," a measure of the number of students eligible for free or reduced-cost lunch due to low family income. The formula provides more money to schools with more poor students.
Matt Ruess, chief financial officer for the Crown Point Community School Corp., said complexity index adequately seeks to make up for differences in student needs. However, Ruess said, artificial limits added to the formula change how much money different school corporations receive for each student.
Crown Point has a similar complexity index to school corporations in downstate Zionsville and West Lafayette. But Crown Point receives only $5,061.80 per pupil, while Zionsville receives $5,545.68 and West Lafayette gets $6,037.67, Ruess said.
"We're not asking to have their money, we're asking the formula to be adhered to without limits," Ruess said.
State Sen. Ed Charbonneau, R-Valparaiso, chairman of the Interim Study Committee on the School Funding Formula, said he's willing to consider changes to improve funding equity, but all school funding legislation is hemmed in by a larger problem.
"There isn't any more money," Charbonneau said. "When we talk about a lot of this stuff, we're just moving it from one person's pocket to another person's pocket, and that's going to be a struggle."
Charbonneau said one change he's likely to propose for next year's state budget-writing legislative session is reforming the "de-ghoster" -- three years of money paid to a school to support a "ghost" student that has left the school. The de-ghoster allows schools to moderate over time the effects of students entering and leaving a school.
For example, if a school has 60 third-graders in three classes of 20 students, but loses eight of them the next year, should the school cram the 52 fourth-graders into two classes of 26 students? With the de-ghoster, the school can afford to keep three classes to avoid dramatic increases in class size and to more easily accommodate new students.
"I can understand not being able to do it immediately, but why does it take three years?" Charbonneau said.
Gary Community School Corp. is likely to be hit hardest if changes are made to the school funding formula. Gary has lost 32 percent of its students over the past five years but receives one of the highest per-pupil payments from the state -- more than $8,000 per year.
Three downstate school corporations have sued to correct this inequality in student payments. The first hearing in that case is next month in Hamilton County.
State Sen. Earline Rogers, D-Gary, said those schools don't understand that Gary needs and uses the extra funds.
"Just because you're losing students doesn't change the fact that some of your fixed costs remain the same," Rogers said.
