Senate Bill 2616: Funding Formula Technical Amendments

February 5, 2025March 5, 2025 Bill Tracker

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SB 2616 died in the House Education Committee on March 4. 

Explanation of the Bill

Senate Bill 2616 makes technical amendments to relevant code to refer to the Mississippi Student Funding Formula. It also makes a substantive correction to the definition of net enrollment for determining school district appropriations and expands the grade span considered for calculating the CTE weight.

Updating References

Last session, the legislature passed the Mississippi Student Funding Formula, which replaced the Mississippi Adequate Education Program as the state’s public school funding formula. Due to the length and complexity of the bill, some references to MAEP were overlooked before final passage. This bill updates those references to now refer to “total funding formula” funds so that the provisions can be rightly understood. Other amendments delete references to “MAEP special education teacher units” as special education is no longer funded based on teacher units. These changes are purely technical in nature and not controversial.

Correcting the Definition of Net Enrollment

One of only two substantive changes in this bill is a correction to the definition of net enrollment for school districts. The conference report last session introduced last-minute errors to 37-151-207(a) by omitting sentences which made the remaining language no longer make sense. The update corrects this problem to define the school district net enrollment to be used for formula calculations as “the school district’s net enrollment for months two (2) and three (3) for the preceding school year for which funds are being appropriated.”

Expanding the Grade Span Considered for CTE

The final substantive change to the bill adds seventh and eighth grade students enrolled in CTE courses to the calculation of the CTE weight. Current law counts each student in grades 9-12 enrolled in a CTE course to count once when calculating additional funding. This amendment would expand this count to include students in grades 7-12 enrolled in a CTE course. This would have the impact of increasing the amount of funds generated by the weight for most school districts.

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