Speaker Jason White made waves Monday when he revealed the House of Representatives will consider scrapping the Mississippi Adequate Education Program (MAEP) for what he considers a better avenue for K-12 funding.
White broke the news during The Gallo Show, saying the new formula will be more coherent than the MAEP, which was created in 1997 but has only been fully funded twice as lawmakers argue year in and year out over how the basics should be delivered to operating school districts.
“It will scrap the MAEP formula,” White said, adding that the new program should not only be easier to understand but also easier to fully fund. “It would go to a more student-based, student-weighted funding formula that you or I could understand.”
In the House bill – which goes against one currently being considered in the Senate to modify and fully fund MAEP – the new formula’s funding would not be based on teacher units or what schools received in previous years. Rather, the objective is for the individual student to be prioritized based on their specific needs, according to White.
“I could bring an iPad up here and I can say, ‘How do you want to tweak this? You want to put more emphasis on low income? You want to put more emphasis on special education? You want to put more emphasis on workforce development? Here are the weights.’ You can tweak them any way you want, plug in the base student costs, and it gives you a number,” White said. “It’s very easy to understand.”
Moving away from the MAEP’s “27 percent rule,” which requires local school districts to pay a maximum of 27 percent of the total cost of their part in the program while the state covers the rest, the updated formula could require districts to compensate an elevated share of the program or even nothing at all, depending on the resources at a district’s disposal.
“We’re not going to do things simply because that’s the way we have always done them,” White continued. “We want to change the funding formula and get it
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