HB22-1202 (Herod & McCluskie/ Zenzinger & Coleman) School Finance Student Poverty Measure

Position

The Children’s Campaign supports this bill, and submitted comments to the School Finance Legislative Interim Committee supporting the approach it recommends. The experience of child poverty presents barriers to learning. To provide students from low-income families with the resources and opportunities to succeed, we must use an accurate measure of economic hardship. Unfortunately, our reliance on free and reduced-price lunch forms for school funding purposes has been a growing problem for years, and the pandemic made this especially apparent as we saw at-risk student counts decline dramatically. Because of Colorado’s high enrollment rate in Medicaid and CHP+, we believe that using Identified Student Percentage (ISP) supplemented with Medicaid would have the effect of automatically capturing a larger number of students who qualify for means-tested social services. We also see benefits to using a multi-pronged approach that includes student-centered neighborhood weights. For example, indicators such as parental educational attainment and home ownership rates have the potential to capture other measures that affect children’s educational trajectories.