Greenwood Commonwealth. March 8, 2024.
Editorial: INSPIRE Does Look Like A Better Plan
When Republican Mississippi lawmakers first started talking about revamping the state’s funding formula for its K-12 public schools, the suspicion was this was an attempt to reduce funding.
After all, the Legislature had done a poor job of living up to its past promises, only fully funding the current formula twice since it was adopted in 1997.
But the legislation the House passed this week, by a large bipartisan margin, would appear to refute the skeptics. Instead, after several improvements were made to the original proposal, what was adopted would seem to be an improvement on the current formula, the Mississippi Adequate Education Program.
As with MAEP, there would be no obligation on the Legislature to fully fund the figure prescribed by the new formula, which goes by the acronym INSPIRE. Backers of the new formula say, however, that they expect to put nearly as much money into INSPIRE for its first year as MAEP would produce fully funded.
However large that pot of money is, though, what’s most important about INSPIRE is that it would distribute the allocation in a way that takes into account the socioeconomic background of the students each school district serves. Districts that have large concentrations of poverty or large numbers of students who have special needs or are learning English as a second language would receive additional funding. As a result, districts in poor regions such as the Delta would receive more state money per student than those in affluent areas, such as DeSoto County and the Jackson suburbs.
INSPIRE, in other words, appears to have the same goal as MAEP — to equalize funding between property-poor and property-rich school districts — but does it better by putting a larger responsibility on the property-rich districts to foot locally the cost of operating their schools.
Legislation like this is going to be complex, and there may be some downsides in the details that have not come to light yet. Education advocates will be studying it closely, as will the Senate, whose initial inclination is to tweak MAEP rather than abandon it.
It would be safe, however, to assume that the House’s intentions are noble: to create a fairer funding mechanism for public schools and not to underfund them. The skeptics may still be skeptical, but there’s a 95-13 vote in the House that says they are wrong.
___
Columbus Dispatch. March 8, 2024.
Editorial: Reckless lawmaking
Imagine sitting in your home one day, and there’s a knock at the door. You answer, and the person on your front steps shows you a legal contract stating you now own your neighbor’s house.
Stunned, you ask about the mortgage, taxes, whether the neighbor is OK losing his house.
To each, the answer is, “I don’t know.”
You ask, “What if I don’t want the house?” The person answers, “Too bad,” hands you a key and walks away.
This seems an appropriate analogy for what state Senate Education Committee Chairman Dennis DeBar, R-Leakesville, did Tuesday to Mississippi State University and the Mississippi University for Women. With all eyes on a bill that would have moved the residential Mississippi School for Mathematics and Sciences from The W to MSU, DeBar offered a last-minute substitution bill that would merge the universities – transferring assets and control of MUW to the Southeastern Conference behemoth across the river.
The bill sailed through the Education and Appropriations committees, despite presidents from both universities having little to no warning it was coming. DeBar evidently had not even consulted the Institutions of Higher Education, which oversees Mississippi’s eight public universities, and IHL doesn’t seem to support the legislation.
Sure, both the Senate and House must approve DeBar’s bill before the governor can sign it into law, but the proverbial cart is rolling recklessly ahead of the horse at this point.
Where is the feasibility study showing this can even work? MSU President Mark Keenum’s statement Tuesday on the bill seems to ask the same question.
What about facilities? Faculty? Programs? Campus culture? How much money will the state pitch in to ensure the merger’s success?
If DeBar has that information, he clearly didn’t obtain it by communicating with the universities.
Having dodged multiple attempts by The Dispatch to reach him and not having made any other public statements on the bill, DeBar seems comfortable not sharing his motivations with the public either.
Emotions aside, a feasibility study could very well show a merger working better than the status quo. Or not. But such a study would take time, active participation from the stakeholders and a transparent process that produces a detailed plan and timeline.
Hidden agendas and guerilla-style lawmaking is irresponsible, as is foisting onto MSU, without due diligence, a 100-acre university with 2,200 students, a $50 million annual budget and dozens of aging historical buildings.
If this bill becomes law this session, the merging process, even executed in good faith, won’t go as smoothly as it could. Why put MSU or MUW in that position, or IHL for that matter?
Even if this bill fails, it leaves open questions about The W’s future. Whatever the school’s future, we urge legislators to do this right – through planning, transparency and engaging stakeholders. That way, even if the resulting pill is hard to swallow, we’ll all know exactly what medicine we’re taking.
END