Study by the Association for Equity and Funding Shows Gap in School Funding, Part 3
Thursday, October 2nd, 2014 -- 11:26 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 said that students on both sides of the coin, high achievers and harder to teach, suffer in regards to this gap in funding.
Mr. Gaier said, "There's a couple things, one is that it's clear that those three groups of kids are harder to educate which means they may need more services to be able to get to the high levels of learning that we want for all kids."
"There may be a need of tutoring. There may be needs of additional teacher support for special ed. There may be a need for bilingual instruction. There may be a need for social work or higher levels of counseling. And all of those things are an additional cost. Some may need adaptive technologies which is a higher cost."
"The problem, of course, is that in our current funding system, taking special education, for instance, special education is being reimbursed at about 26% of the real cost. So that means that 74% of that cost is coming out of our regular education dollars to try and meet the needs of those kids. Which means that not only are those kids that are harder to educate possibly losing out on opportunities, but also our high achievers may be losing out on some opportunities because we have to take money from our general budgets to fund those special needs students that aren't fully funded at the rate they need to be to meet the learning expectations."
"So, it can be kind of a double-edged sword for both the high level and the harder to educate kids."
Once again the study looked at data for schools from 2004 to 2011 and focused on three key groups of students which were special education, economically disadvantaged and English language learners.
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