By John Lyon
Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK — A legislative subcommittee will recommend that Arkansas’ public schools receive an additional $69 million in per-student funding next year.
The Joint Adequacy Evaluation Oversight Subcommittee voted Tuesday to recommend that the state Legislature increase per-student and categorical funding for public schools by 2.5 percent in the 2011-12 fiscal year.
The panel also said it will recommend a 2.9 percent increase for the 2012-13 fiscal year. The Legislature will review that year’s increase during the 2012 fiscal session and can modify it then if necessary.
The panel based its recommendations on inflation indicators presented by the Bureau of Legislative Research.
The subcommittee also decided to recommend a new approach to transportation funding in an effort to help rural school districts struggling with high transportation costs.
Under the recommendation, per-student transportation funding would be frozen at the current level of $297. The inflationary increase would be applied to a separate funding line item, “enhanced transportation funding,” and would be distributed only to school districts whose transportation costs exceed $297 per student.
The enhanced funding would be distributed based on the number of miles driven transporting students to and from school rather than on a per-student basis.
The House and Senate education committees will meet Monday to review the subcommittee’s recommendations and decide whether to make any changes before passing them on to the Joint Budget Committee.
The subcommittee’s House chairman, Rep. Bill Abernathy, D-Mena, told reporters the enhanced transportation funding will not cover every district’s costs, but he called it a “start in the right direction.”
“Some of them are spending eight times, nine times more money than we’re giving them. It will help them, and that’s what we want to do, and be fair to them,” he said.
The panel adopted the recommendation on transportation funding in a voice vote with no “no” votes heard. Some “no” votes were heard when the panel voted to recommend a 2.5 percent inflationary increase, however.
Sen. Kim Hendren, R-Gravette, called the increase “a 25 percent increase in the increase,” referring to the 2 percent increase approved in the 2009 legislative session.
Hendren said a fellow senator told him that “we don’t want to look at it that way.”
“I’m telling you folks, neither does California, and look at the mess they’re in — or Washington,” he said.
Abernathy said the recommended increase is in line with projected growth in state revenues.
“I think we’re in a pretty comfortable position like that when we have said to the courts our promise is that we fund education on what its needs are, based on our studies,” he said.
The Legislature created the Joint Adequacy Evaluation Oversight Subcommittee as part of its response to a 2002 state Supreme Court ruling that the state’s public school system was inadequately funded. After the Legislature enacted a series of sweeping reforms and funding increases, the court ruled in 2007 that the state was adequately funding public schools.
