Nearly five years after Massachusetts lawmakers overhauled the state’s school funding formula, districts are struggling to balance their budgets for the upcoming school year, prompting many to consider cutting programs and staff or asking taxpayers to dig deeper.
The chief culprit, district leaders and advocates say, is the high rate of inflation that hit the US economy in recent years, much higher than the adjustments used in the new funding formula that was revamped to reflect modern-day costs.
The failure of the new formula to accurately capture inflation could be collectively costing districts hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, according to Colin Jones, deputy policy director at the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, a nonpartisan research institute.