State Aid for Fiscal Year 2022
August 2, 2021
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GoogleNWEAOperationsTeaching & LearningLegalCommunicationsFrom the Director
The SDE released the State Aid numbers on July 20,2021. We are currently in the process of breaking apart the numbers to give our members and budget makers an idea of what to expect for the coming year. We are drawing some strong inferences from the data that we have found on the surface, but there are some interesting issues that are becoming apparent. These are preliminary looks at the data; we will have our final numbers put together as soon as possible.
The current high year for districts sums at 1,196,044.84 WADM. This is based off 74% of state LEA high-year numbers from FY20. The reason the FY21 high year is the largest in this number set is because FY21 had FY19 as 53% of the state LEA high-year number. The FY19 high-year number has dropped off, and we are now moved to FY20 being the high year.
There has been considerable debate across the education world about what is going to happen with attendance post-COVID. When we look at what the starting attendance should have been in the initial WADM, we see a very definitive drop in attendance from the initial allocation attendance to the 1st-quarter statistical report. We saw a further decline from the midterm to the final report. This means we may see a sudden increase of the midterm number based on the 1st-quarter statistical report in FY2, or we have found a new statistical normal. If we see 100% of the students who have left public education return at the start of school, we will see a decline in State Aid.
The increase in State Aid per WADM is based on the increase in the amount of revenue for the formula, the loss of chargeables due to gross production and school land collection deflation and the decrease in the number of WADM due to changes in high-year WADM. The total initial increase of $50.49 should move upward in December. We predicted a $113 increase; the increase at midterm will be close to this. It is impossible to predict the net increase of ad valorem before midterm and the number of students returning to public education.
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