A new report shows that Idaho’s public school funding is failing to adequately support the costs of high-need students — particularly special education students, English language learners and low-income students. 

Idaho’s nonpartisan Office of Performance Evaluations (OPE) last week released its findings on K-12 district characteristics in a report sanctioned by the Legislature’s bipartisan Joint Legislative Oversight Committee. 

The report found that the biggest funding driver for public schools is district size, not student characteristics or needs. Idaho’s public school formula, for instance, only delivers about half of what’s needed for special education students, leading to an $82.2 million funding gap statewide, and increasing districts’ reliance on local taxpayers to make up the difference.

“State funding to districts does not meaningfully change based off of the student characteristics of a district,” Casey Petti, OPE’s principal evaluator, told the oversight committee Friday.

The report’s conclusions don’t necessarily break new ground. Idaho education leaders for years have called for reforms that better account for student characteristics, and Idaho Education News previously reported on the lack of special education funding and growing complaints about schools that fail to serve student needs. But the report put a finer point on the problems as lawmakers debate changes to the state’s school distribution formula. 

And the timing of the report is auspicious for state superintendent Debbie Critchfield, who is sponsoring a bill that would add high-need student weights to a portion of the state’s annual distribution to public schools.

The report provided “validation” that “we’re on the right track here,” Critchfield told Idaho Education News this week. 

“We know that there are factors that mean more resources are needed for certain students. Putting these levers into place allows us to, really, have a more targeted, transparent way of budgeting.”

The Republican’s bill is awaiting a vote in the Senate.

Click here to read the OPE report.

School funding lacks ‘meaningful’ adjustments for high-need students

Last year, the legislative oversight committee tasked OPE with making an “apples-to-apples” comparison of school districts to find out how funding disparities affect public education. 

The oversight committee includes four Republicans and four Democrats, equally split between House and Senate members. Established in 1994, OPE conducts nonpartisan analyses of state programs and policies, as the committee directs. 

The report found that state funding for school districts — about 61% of the money supporting public schools and by far the largest source — is primarily driven by district size.

Larger districts receive less state funding per student while smaller districts get more. The 32 largest school districts collect $7,196 per student on average, and the 23 smallest districts get $13,744. 

But this funding method does not “meaningfully” adjust for high-need students, the report said. Idaho distributes school funds through a cohort, or resource-based, formula tied to student attendance. Enacted in 1994, the formula calculates “support units,” which essentially represent the cost to operate a classroom. Neighboring Oregon, Nevada, Utah and Montana, on the other hand, use per-pupil weighted formulas tied to student needs. 

“Both funding methods can be designed to accommodate varying district characteristics and student needs,” the report said. “We found that in comparison to neighboring states, Idaho’s school funding formula contains fewer or weaker adjustments for district and student characteristics.”

Here’s how Idaho’s model has affected funding for particular types of students: 

Special education 

In 2023, Critchfield’s office sounded an alarm on what was then a $66 million special education funding gap. This shortfall has climbed to $82.2 million, the OPE report showed. The study also offered a closer look at the causes. 

The state formula funds additional support units to account for special education costs at flat, U.S. Census-based rates — 6% for primary schools and 5.5% for secondary schools. The 5.8% statewide average essentially serves as a funding cap that doesn’t increase when districts have higher rates of special education students. 

Meanwhile, the actual percentage of special education students is 11.5%, and district-by-district populations vary widely, from 5% to 24%. While urban school districts have the most special education students, the report found, small and remote districts tend to have higher percentages of special education students.

This means small districts are more likely to fund special education from their overall budget. And year-to-year enrollment changes and demand for services impact them more severely. 

Eighty-one of 110 school districts spent more on special education than the state’s distribution in 2023, according to the report. (Idaho has 115 school districts but five had incomplete data.)

The report also showed that Idaho provides the least additional funding for special education funding among neighboring states. Special education students in Idaho are funded at 1.2 times general population students. The multiplier is 2.43 in Utah, 2.06 in Washington and 1.73 in Oregon. 

The formula isn’t exclusively to blame for the special education funding gap, however. For decades, Congress has underfunded the 1975 federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which promised to cover 40% of states’ special education costs. Idaho receives about half of that.

Click here to read more about the federal government’s role in special education funding.

English language learners, low-income households, at-risk students

Districts also receive state funding for English language learners (ELL) at a uniform rate — $228 per student this year — but the percentages of ELL students in districts vary widely, mostly depending on geography. 

ELL students are most common in south central Idaho, the report found, and least common in North Idaho. Wendell, Jerome, Blaine County school districts “are tasked with the education of students with a wide variety of linguistic backgrounds,” the report said. 

Among neighboring states that provide additional funding for ELL students — Montana does not — only Utah offers less than Idaho, according to the report. Oregon schools get an additional $5,374 per student and Nevada schools get $4,236.

Meanwhile, Idaho does not provide direct funding for students from low-income households, at-risk students or gifted and talented students. 

Idaho is one of just seven U.S. states that doesn’t provide supplemental state funding for low-income households, the report said, and it’s the only state in the region that doesn’t weight state allocations for at-risk students. 

A footnote in the report points out that Idaho has public alternative schools that serve two-thirds of the state’s “identified” at-risk students. But most districts don’t have an alternative school, and there’s no dedicated funding for at-risk students who attend traditional schools. 

State policymakers consider formula changes

Idaho lawmakers have considered reworking the state’s aging public school funding formula since 2016, and this year, a change has made progress in the Statehouse — so far. 

Critchfield’s Senate Bill 1096 would distribute districts’ discretionary funding — about $400 million of the $3.3 billion public schools budget — through a new per-pupil formula that adds weights for student characteristics. 

Districts would receive base funding multipliers for special education students, English language learners, low-income students, at-risk students and gifted and talented students. Students in small districts and small charter schools would also see a bump.

The superintendent’s weighted formula bill isn’t the only proposal on the table, however. Rep. Wendy Horman, R-Idaho Falls, last month introduced House Bill 279, which would similarly move districts’ discretionary funding into a per-pupil formula. 

The differences between the two bills are that HB 279 calls for weights in the future, and sets aside $14.2 million to ensure rural districts aren’t harmed by the per-pupil calculation. An earlier version of SB 1096 faced criticism from rural school leaders whose districts stood to lose discretionary dollars under the formula change.

Fixed costs for facilities, transportation and staff don’t change when student enrollment fluctuates, Ririe Superintendent Jeff Gee wrote in a column published by EdNews. And SB 1096’s small district weight “fails to account for the sharp rise in per-student costs as enrollment declines.”

The Senate Wednesday approved amendments aimed at appeasing rural districts. An updated weight for small districts would capture a wider range of districts. Previously, there was a 600-student maximum to qualify for the weight, and districts like Ririe, which has 644 students, didn’t qualify.

The new boundary for small districts is a “curve” rather than a “hard cutoff,” Critchfield said. “We wanted to soften that so it wasn’t such a rigid line.”

Wednesday’s amendments moved SB 1096 to the full Senate’s calendar. HB 279 is awaiting a committee hearing in the House.