Sounding the alarm on the low income count

 

If you'd prefer to review this with funny Muppets gifs, you can do that on my Twitter thread here. 

As I mentioned in my Q&A on the FY25 state budget (as well as elsewhere), the state funding formula for schools is enrollment-driven. In other words, it's at ground based on the kids that are enrolled in your school district. Setting aside the changes within the Student Opportunity Act, the two ways that a district's foundation budget can change is through changes in enrollment and changes in the inflation rate.

Reminder: you should be concerned about this year's inflation rate of 1.35%!

On enrollment, in addition to a student being in a grade (or, for high school, vocational or not program), students are also designated as English learners, which has an additional funding increment, and low income, which has an additional funding increment. And the low income increments going up are the biggest drivers of change in the Student Opportunity Act.

Those following budgets may remember that in the first years of SOA we not only had the dollar amounts going up from that; we also had the count of students who were considered low income going up. This was due to the state being tasked with coming up with another means of counting students. Since FY17, the state has counted as low income students who are participating in state public assistance programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Transitional Aid to Families with Dependent Children (TAFDC), MassHealth, and foster care, or who are homeless. Part of what has been going on since SOA, and what has been driving the count upward, is that the state's system of matching kids has improved. They literally take the two databases, one of students enrolled in the above, the other of students enrolled in schools, and they match them. And they've really been getting much better at it.

To that, the state has added a supplemental program, where the district can, through paperwork, say "hey, you missed one" to be sure that student is added.

Note that none of the above has anything to do with free and reduced lunch enrollment. If your district isn't funded for universal free lunch by the federal government, the state's supplemental program fills in for nutrition funding on top of the students whose forms you have, but those forms in no way impact your low income student count.

Still with me?

The above matching to count low income is called "direct certification," as students are directly certified by the state as being low income. The place where an issue arises is if anything impacts enrollment in those other programs. And something has, in a big way.

During the pandemic, the federal government froze enrollment in Medicaid programs for the period of the public health emergency. When that public health emergency was declared over, states had to go back to reviewing the enrollments. This "redetermination" started last March, and there have been ongoing concerns about how many people are going to lose coverage, many due to speaking a first language other than English, mobility, homelessness, and so forth. 

And some of them are kids.

Between the FY24 and the FY25 counts, there are 6715 fewer kids counted as low income across Massachusetts (in an overall enrollment that went up). We haven't seen that count drop in years.

Because this count runs on a four year basis, that is only going to get worse.

And again, it isn't that those kids necessarily are no longer poor. In fact, it's good guess that they still are. They just aren't being counted.

That's bad in a number of ways, but from a school budget perspective, it undermines the major driver of increased funding for schools that serve predominately low income kids, and it will do so in the final two years of Student Opportunity Act implementation.

We need to be sounding alarms on this.