How the state's opioid settlement distribution didn't understand school funding and how that disadvantaged cities and towns in regional districts

First, let's please give a MAJOR thank you to the teeny Harvard Press, which covers the town of Harvard, and has spent over a year working out how it is that their town received the funding it did through the opioid settlement.*

The article is here, and you are going to want to read it, even if all you care about in this scenario is school funding. Here are my bullets on why:

• Because Massachusetts has a weak county system, having the county government allocate the funds by town, as was done elsewhere, wouldn't have worked, so Massachusetts used a formula: it took spending by the town in nine categories that were potentially connected to the settlement--including education!--and then that amount was assigned a percentage of the county spending on all those categories within the county. 
  
  
• However, spending by the town to an “intergovernmental agency” was not counted, so town funding of regional school districts did not count at all.
  
  
• And majority state funded districts, like the cities are by design, were underrepresented, as only their local spending counted.
  
  

These are two flaws in this calculation that should have been immediately obvious to anyone who understands how school funding works in Massachusetts. 

Read this. Share it.

_______________________________________

*And let me just say now: if you're a bigger media outlet, and you pick up this story, you had BEST cite The Harvard Press as the source of the story. Don't be a schmuck about this.