David Hart, chief financial officer of the Denver Public Schools, knows his way around a school finance spreadsheet, and he demonstrated that knowledge Monday during testimony in the Lobato v. State school funding lawsuit.
Hart spend much of his nearly three hours of testimony manipulating spreadsheets on a laptop perched on the edge of the witness box. Everyone else in the courtroom watched in real time on a large screen.
He alternated that with low-tech interludes of drawing diagrams and formulas on a large pad of paper mounted on an easel.
Much of Hart’s rapidly delivered testimony would have taxed even school finance wonks and as 4 p.m. passed, plaintiffs’ lawyer Kathleen Gebhardt said, “We’ve covered a lot of ground and a lot of numbers. Are there any takeaways?”
“The negative factor did away with the at-risk weighting,” Hart said.
What he was talking about is this: Every school district receives a base amount of per-pupil funding every year. The amounts given to individual districts vary because of additional money awarded through what are called “factors,” such as district size, cost of living for staff and number of at-risk students. In essence, districts get extra money if they’re small, are in high cost areas of the state and have lots of poor kids.
In 2009, the legislature added a new factor named the “negative factor,” which is a mathematical device designed to reduce total school funding to the amount the legislature thinks it can afford to spend.
Hart’s spreadsheet show was focused on showing the effects of the factors and other things on the budgets for Aurora, DPS and Douglas County.
For 2011-12, the at-risk factor was calculated to award Denver an additional $60.6 million. Then the negative factor took $76.3 million away from Denver.
Hart was preceded on the witness stand by state Sen. Rollie Heath, D-Boulder. Health is author of the Bright Colorado school funding ballot measure, now under review by the secretary of state, and a member of the Senate Education Committee.
Heath was on the stand for just under 20 minutes and was there, from the plaintiffs’ point of view, to answer a couple of key questions.
Has the legislature done anything to improve funding of schools? “I wish I could say yes, but the answer is no.”
Has the legislature increased mandates on school districts without providing funding? “Yes, I was part of that. What we basically asked was, ‘Reform the system’ without giving you (districts) any resources.”
Highlights of the day:
TONE: It was another of those trial days that mixed policy and emotion. Lillian Leroux, a resident of Commerce City and an individual plaintiff in the case, testified about the problems her foster children (some of them grandchildren) experienced in the Adams 14 schools.
“They’re not prepared to go to college, and they’re not prepared to get a job. … I don’t feel they are ready to be out in this world,” she said.
QUOTE: “No.” – Adams 14 Superintendent Susan Chandler, after being asked if the district has sufficient resources to prepare its largely poor student body to meet state achievement requirements.
DOCUMENTS: Try your hand at parsing your district’s finances, as Hart did. Check out CDE’s district school finance worksheet. Behind in your reading? Check our archive of Lobato stories.
COLOR: Hart essentially was creating exhibits on the fly, and Gebhardt periodically asked District Judge Sheila Rappaport for “technology recesses” so that a tech could fiddle with Hart’s laptop and so Hart’s work could be captured for later review.
UPCOMING: Tuesday’s witnesses are Steven Barnett, a national expert on early childhood education, and Stefan Welsh, who will give a “multi-media presentation about school districts,” according to the plaintiffs’ website.