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Lawmakers divided on school transportation funding Tuesday, Jun 3, 2008 By John Lyon Arkansas News Bureau LITTLE ROCK - Members of a legislative committee agreed Monday that rising gas prices are causing a problem for many of Arkansas' public school districts, though they deadlocked on how to address the problem. Rep. Bill Abernathy, D-Mena, House chairman of the Joint Adequacy Evaluation Oversight Subcommittee, brought up the issue as the panel began reviewing the state's per-student school funding formula for the two-year period beginning July 1, 2009. After two motions related to transportation funding failed to pass, the committee adjourned but was scheduled to reconvene today. Abernathy told the committee that two-thirds of the state's school districts have transportation costs that exceed the $286 per-student included in the current funding formula. Transportation funding is based on total enrollment and does not take into account that districts with similar enrollment totals may have vastly different transportation needs, Abernathy said. Districts' spending on transportation ranges from $69 to $600 per student, he said. "We have school districts across the state with some of them having to transport 90 percent of their students, some of them transporting 10 percent of their students, and we pay all of them $286 per student enrolled in their school," he said. Abernathy proposed the committee recommend creating a new "high-cost category" to provide a higher level of funding to districts that are not able to meet their transportation needs with $286 per student. "When school districts must spend more money to transport students than the matrix provides, then that would trigger them moving from the matrix of $286, and the extra money they are required to spend to transporting their students would be drawn from this high-cost category that we provide," Abernathy said. He estimated the measure would cost the state about $35 million annually. Sen. Jim Argue, D-Little Rock, said he would like to try to recoup some of the money going to overfunded schools. "I'm uncomfortable, given other needs, directing $35 million here where there's no effort to recapture the transportation money that's being used for some other purpose in the district," Argue said. Sen. Shawn Womack, R-Mountain Home, questioned whether transportation is now part of the state's constitutional mandate to provide the means for an adequate education. He argued that obligating the state to higher funding levels for transportation without determining costs first could open the state up to a lawsuit. Assistant Attorney General Matt McCoy told the committee that transportation is part of the state's funding matrix that has been approved by the state Supreme Court. "I don't know many attorneys who would feel comfortable standing before the Arkansas Supreme Court arguing that transportation is not an element of adequacy," he said. A motion by Rep. Rick Saunders, D-Hot Springs, to endorse Abernathy's proposal failed. An alternate proposal by Argue, which would have called for the committee to develop a new transportation funding mechanism but with no reference to creating a high-cost category, also failed. |
