Study by the Association for Equity and Funding Shows Gap in School Funding, Part 1
Tuesday, September 30th, 2014 -- 10:23 AM
-The Association for Equity and Funding recently released information from a study they commissioned that looked at school funding for districts around the state for the past 10 years.John Gaier, District Administrator for Neillsville and Chair of the Association explained the study in more detail.
Mr. Gaier said, "The Association for Equity and Funding has been around for some time. They have really fought for schools that have low property wealth. Making sure that kids, really, from all across the state, have equal opportunity to a high level of education."
"What the goal of the study was, really, to try to find out if there is actual data that shows that our highest need students are not being funded at the level that we believe they need to be funded to in order to be able to educate them. We're talking about special education students, economically disadvantaged students and students that are English language learners or kids that don't speak English that are in our districts."
"We thought our budgets have gotten tighter and that we have not been able to serve all of those kids as well as we'd like to meet their learning needs. So we commissioned a study with the Forward Institute to see if there was a disparity in funding for those kids."
The study looked at data for schools from 2004 to 2011.
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