School Funding

796 Words2 Pages

Fund Allocation Paper

School Finance

Iowa is very unique when it comes to school finance. We use the single count date for the purpose of funding the state’s school districts. This is a count of the number of students in attendance on October 1st. This is when the federal government requires a count of the number of students eligible for the free and reduced price lunch program for purposes of Title I funding. An advantage to using the single count date is that it is reasonably easy and it also helps to cut down on administrative costs. There are many disadvantages to using this system. The single count date does not give districts any type of financial incentives for holding onto students after the count date. In most districts, enrollment will rise or fall from fall to spring, so if you have to use the single count date then districts could be more over-funded or under-funded. There are some students who don’t enroll even enroll in school until after October 1st, so this would cause districts to receive no funding for these students.

The top four things the public should know about school finance in Iowa is as follows:

The total amount of money a district has to spend is primarily driven by the number of children a district has. We can’t just raise as much money (or as little) as we want locally.

The tax rate of a district is largely driven by formula and only a small portion is impacted by the school board.

Certain funds have to be spent on certain things. This explains why a district might have the funds to pave a parking lot, even though they don’t have money to pay teachers.

Most of our expenses are staff: approximately 80% of a district’s general fun is ...

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...day of students enrolled in school throughout the school year. ADM differs from ADA because the daily count includes absent students. Advantages to this technique involve the fact there is a great accuracy, financial incentives by keeping students in school all year, and districts funding will not be affected for the absent students. Because ADM is complex, it is subject to local manipulation, and lacks commonsense appeal. An imperfection to this method is that it provides no financial incentive for promoting attendance. Another disadvantage is that ADM involves numerous counting and reporting, it could also be more time-consuming and costly to administrators.

If I had to choose between ADA and ADM, I would chose ADM as it appears you have the advantage of allocating more dollars towards all classifications. It provides a better way to line-item your budget.

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