Putnam County’s ability to pay for its students’ education led to a reduction in state funding.
Director of Schools Corby King said the TISA formula uses an index from the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations and the Center for Business and Economic Research. The index calculatse local funding capacity.
“We have a higher ability to pay so we receive less in the TISA funding, our 30 percent portion is a little bit less than what it would have been,” King said. “That was that decrease that we saw in the April formula, it was a little over $200,000 because our local capacity increased.”
King said the state determines fiscal capacity by averaging three years of data including per capita income, taxable sales per pupil, and equalized property assessments. King said Putnam County currently spends just over $11,000 per pupil annually, which he said is near the state average.
King said the state typically covers 70 percent of education costs while local communities are expected to pick up the remaining 30 percent.
“It requires more to fund education than what is actually in the formula,” King said. “I know that’s true in Putnam County, I think that’s true in most communities in Tennessee.”
King said the school system must rely on the Putnam County Commission to bridge the gap between state funding and the actual cost of operations. King said the district is currently asking the commission to fund approximately $2 million in capital projects as one-time purchases to avoid increasing the county’s permanent maintenance of effort requirements.
“The school board says ‘This is what we need,’ and we work with the county commission then to fund those needs,” King said. “The state provides certain amount of fund, we need ‘X’ number of funds above what the state requires.”
King said the district has already implemented significant budget cuts to address the funding gap and the loss of students to homeschooling. King said parents often cite concerns regarding school safety as the primary reason for moving their children out of public school.
“A lot of things what we hear is it’s got to do around school safety, the threats around violence, mass shootings, things like that,” King said. “A lot of parents just aren’t comfortable leaving their children in the public setting right now.”
King said the school system will receive a final funding estimate from the state in late June.