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An Analysis Of The Impacts Of Including Income In Determining Community Wealth In The Maine K-12 School Funding Formula, David L. Silvernail, James E. Sloane

State of Education

A key feature of K‐12 school funding formulas is establishing an ability‐to‐pay provision in the formula. With the exception of Hawaii, all states share the funding of their K‐12 school system between the State and local communities. And all school formulas use some mechanism to determine the ability of a local community to pay its equitable share of the costs of education. For Maine, as well as a majority of other states, local property wealth is used to determine ability‐to‐pay. The theory is that communities with higher property wealth are more wealthy communities, and, thus, more able to pay for …