Some Republican lawmakers and the state superintendent of education are united to change the way the state calculates school attendance as it pertains to school funding, but a change will have to wait until next session.
State Rep. Kent McCarty, R-Hattiesburg, sponsored a bill, House Bill 1178, that would've transitioned the way the Mississippi Department of Education counts students from daily attendance to enrollment. The bill died without a floor vote in the House Education Committee.
Right now, one of the key variables in the Mississippi Adequate Education Formula is average daily attendance. The MAEP formula uses that metric, along with a multiplier for children in poverty plus add-on programs such as transportation and special education to compute a base student cost and decide how the more than $2 billion in taxpayer money for the MAEP gets allocated.
State Superintendent Carey Wright seeks a switch from average daily attendance to an enrollment-based system known as average daily membership. She has reiterated her desire to change to ADM with every meeting with lawmakers this session.
“Average daily membership is where we need to be,” Wright told the Senate Education Committee. “When you come into pull ADA (data), if kids are absent, then they're not taken into account.
“But if you're talking about ADM, then it doesn't make any difference when you pull that data because the schools still have to accommodate all because they have registered, they still have to pay the teachers for all its teachers that they have. So, the ADA, to me, is not as reliable as an average daily membership.”
McCarty, who ran on an education platform and whose mother was a school administrator, says the switch wouldn’t increase the amount of money lawmakers appropriate for K-12 education. Rather it would give districts more certainty and ensure that those districts with at-risk students with attendance problems aren’t penalized.
“This is a much easier way for schools to budget and to know what’s going to be coming in based on the number of students they’re serving overall rather than the number of students who happen to come on one, certain day,” McCarty said. “It’s a much more fair way to do this.”
McCarty’s bill isn’t the only reform legislation that could change the way the MDE calculates this measure for funding distribution.
A bill that has passed the Senate Education Committee sponsored by state Sen. Dennis DeBar, R-Leakesville, would hold school districts blameless for attendance counts this year. If Senate Bill 2149 becomes law, districts would use attendance data from the previous year for funding calculation purposes. The bill passed the Senate unanimously and is now in the hands of the House.
McCarty’s efforts are supported by upcoming research from the libertarian Reason Foundation. Christian Barnard, an education policy analyst at Reason who specializes in state education and school district finance system, said that switching to an ADM model in Mississippi would ensure that poorer districts receive more money since at-risk children are often those who have attendance problems.
He also says an ADA model penalizes school districts with more at-risk children due to their attendance problems.
Attendance-related issues due to health, spotlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, are another reason why he says switching to an ADM-based model for funding allocation makes more sense.
He argues that an attendance-based model doesn’t act as an effective cudgel to force districts to get students to class and is the worst way to count students for funding purposes.
“I think that moving, ideally to average daily membership, that the method we favor because that's going to get you the most current counts and the closest thing to dollars actually following students in real time,” Barnard said.
The states have different ways of counting attendance. Some states such as Colorado, Kansas and Massachusetts, do a single enrollment county, usually in the fall.
Some states, such as Georgia, South Carolina and Louisiana, count enrollment on multiple days during the year.
Mississippi is one of the few states, along with California, Idaho, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri and Texas, to use the average daily attendance model. Mississippi uses ADA from the second and third months of the prior year when calculating its funding formula.
Most states use average daily membership, including Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina, New York among others.
Alabama, Vermont and Alaska count enrollment over a single day, while Florida does so over multiple days.
