How a legislative report recommends changing the way Oklahoma pays for public schools

Oklahoma’s schooling funding system is sophisticated.

Check out the 540-page state assist calculation doc for every district should you don’t consider it.

Nevertheless it’s additionally extremely vital. The system is used to find out how a lot state assist every faculty district receives primarily based on quite a lot of elements. For the upcoming faculty 12 months, that can decide the place a lot of the $3.2 billion allotted by the state to fund Okay-12 schooling will go.

This 12 months, there was a slight improve for schooling expenditures, however none of that can go into day-to-day operations at faculties. Lawmakers stored the cash going into the system the identical, whereas rising funding for some particular, largely administrative applications.

That’s why lawmakers requested the Legislative Workplace of Fiscal Transparency (LOFT) to evaluation how public funding goes to public faculties in a draft report launched and introduced Tuesday.

Listed here are some topline findings:

• In 2022, greater than half of all college students in 72% of Oklahoma’s faculty districts have been economically deprived — a complete of 405,000 out of 680,000 college students.
• The funding system has been largely unchanged since 1981.
• Regardless of trainer pay raises, funding for in-classroom expenditures has been largely flat for the final decade. Oklahoma ranks forty fourth nationally in per pupil spending. 
• The state’s accountability measures for monitoring schooling funding spent — a part of the Oklahoma Value Accounting System, or OCAS — is insufficient because it doesn’t provide sufficient info to lawmakers.