After more than a year of meetings and hundreds of hours of work per person, we’re disappointed to report that the School Funding Interim Commission has fallen short of its legislatively-mandated tasks (House Bill 153, 2025). As members appointed to the Commission, we feel compelled to give the public our frank assessment of where the Commission succeeded and where it fell flat.
We were able to identify a number of the student demographics that need better funding mechanisms. We’ve highlighted that the tallying of student populations within districts needs a better system to allocate money to cover the actual costs of providing those students with an education. Special education funding requires more clarity in definitions, and more examination is needed of the growth of base funding and reliance on the state’s General Fund. The Commission also voted to propose several education funding changes that may make improvements on the margins.
However, after spending over $327,000 during this process, the Commission avoided discussion about planning for student academic success, didn’t account for decreasing enrollment trends, and absolutely did not achieve its fundamental goal of creating a simpler, more streamlined, and more effective school funding formula.
Although our property tax system has garnered the moniker as being the most (unnecessarily) complicated in the nation, our school funding formula isn’t far behind. That’s not only a disservice to school administrators and classroom teachers who have to make their budgets and operate within those budgets; it’s also not fair to the taxpayers whose bills depend more on school costs than any other individual type of government service.
We had a lot of input during this process from education-related professional organizations, teachers, and a handful of school board members. Unfortunately, public involvement didn’t include many parents or average citizens worried about their tax burdens and the educational needs of our students.
We hope that efforts by the Legislature and any future School Funding Commission are specifically targeted toward addressing the shortcomings of this Commission and actually achieving the goal of having a school funding formula that is adequate, fair, transparent, understandable, and efficient. Anything less is a disservice to current students and future generations of Montanans.
Sen. Becky Beard (R-Elliston), Sen. Sue Vinton (R-Billings), and Rep. Lee Deming (R-Laurel) are members of the School Funding Interim Commission.