Mississippi Legislature chambers pass competing education funding bills. See what they are

Just one day after the Mississippi House of Representatives passed a bill to fully scrap the Mississippi Adequate Education Program funding formula with a new model on Wednesday, lawmakers in the Senate passed a modified version of MAEP on Thursday.

On Thursday, Senate Education Chair Dennis DeBar, R-Leakesville, presented Senate Bill 2332, which would modify the state's current funding model to bring more money to school districts.

"This is a bill that we passed last year 52-0 with just two changes," DeBar said. "… (The funding) will be an increase for most school districts."

If passed by through both chambers, the bill would maintain MAEP’s objective funding formula that accounts for student and cost growths, though at a lower level than the current MAEP formula. It would also require wealthier school districts to contribute more to the base student cost, and it would also not adjust what poorer districts receive in funding.

That funding increase would amount to about $2.94 billion, which still falls short of what the MAEP formula calls for, which is just about $2.9 billion. Since it was enacted in 1997, MAEP has only been fully funded by Mississippi lawmakers twice, despite laws dictating them to fund the education program.

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The bill will now be sent to the House where it is highly unlikely to receive much support by House Education Committee Chair Rob Roberson, who wrote the House's bill, the INSPIRE Act and is committed to a total replacement of MAEP.

Fighting between Mississippi House and Senate

During his presentation of the bill, Oxford Republican Sen. Nicole Boyd asked DeBar if he had read the INSPIRE Act (House Bill 1453), to which he responded that he has not, but he has heard it was drafted by conservative third-party advocacy groups such as Empower Mississippi and the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

"In about mid-February, I met with Mississippi First, which explained the whole process of the House legislation as it was going to be dropped," DeBar said. "They collaborated with Empower Mississippi, the Mississippi Center for Public Policy beginning last (year). In January 2023, those three groups got together to change the formula. They hired some group out of Massachusetts to collaborate with them to devise this new plan … We had not been consulted and had not been made aware of it until (February).

DeBar wasn't the only one questioning the House education funding plan Thursday morning.

Rep. Robert Johnson, D-Adams County, who leads the House Democratic Caucus, called on lawmakers to reconsider House Bill 1453 after he allegedly discovered that many of the numbers presented in the bill relating to school district funding did not come from lawmakers or the Legislative Budget Office, which calculates how legislation is funded. However, Johnson's motion failed.

During a press conference while Senators voted to approve of DeBar's MAEP revision, Roberson, joined by House Speaker Jason White, R-West, told reporters and members of the public that DeBar's and Johnson's claims were false.

Read about House Bill 1453 Mississippi House passes new education funding model

Roberson said the numbers Johnson referred to were not written by outside organizations but were instead created by lawmakers with help from the Mississippi Department of Education, and they were researched by the Legislative Budget Office before going to the floor for a vote.

"There was a communication breakdown in terms of where the (numbers for our school districts) came from," Roberson said. "We created the bill … and we used MDE data to do it."

He and White both also denied claims that Empower Mississippi had written any part of the bill, despite the organization having drafted one with many similarities to HB 1453. Roberson later confirmed with the Clarion Ledger he did in fact work with Rachel Canter, executive director of Mississippi First, a third-party education advocacy group, who is working with Empower Mississippi and the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

"Rachel Canter was very helpful in helping us understand this," Roberson said.

White added that while he has great respect for what his colleagues in the Senate are doing to address education funding in Mississippi, he believes the House's approach is superior.

"They have great ideas, too," White said. "I simply think on this issue we differ. They want to stay with a formula that has only been funded twice in its history and that most people cannot understand. Now, we have come forward with a straight easy-to-understand formula, and we've actually put our money where our mouth is."

As far as which bill will make the final cut by this year's legislative deadline, Roberson previously said that whatever bill makes it to the other chamber's floor for a vote, it is highly likely that it will go to a conference of House members and Senators for an intense debate.

Grant McLaughlin covers state government for the Clarion Ledger. He can be reached at [email protected] or 972-571-2335.

This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: MS House, Senate pass separate K-12 education funding bills