Nonprofit Mississippi News Wednesday’s silence on rumors that the Legislature might return to Jackson this spring or summer to attempt to pass a new school funding formula was a relief. During a breakfast at the Mississippi Economic Council, Senator Gray Tollison (R-Oxford) stated definitively that there would not be a special session. “There are other issues being dealt with by the Legislature, one being the BRIDGE Act and the infrastructure issue.” “That (educational formula) bill is dead and to my knowledge there’s no intention to bring it up.” House Bill 957 would have replaced Mississippi’s current funding formula with the Mississippi Uniform Per Student Funding Formula Act of 2018. The bill, which all eight Republicans and seven Democrats voted to send back to the committee, died earlier this month. Tollison stated that the Legislature will be returning in January and that he expects a new funding formula to replace the one passed by the House and abandoned in the Senate. Tollison reiterated his criticisms of the Mississippi Adequate Education Formula. He said that the public has lost faith and that the formula is confusing. MAEP mandates local districts to pay $28 per $1,000 in assessed property value within their school district. Also known as 28 mills, Schools can levy a higher tax rate than the district, up to 55 mills. The law also contains the 27 percent rule. This means that local districts are not required to contribute more than 27 per cent of funds calculated using the MAEP formula. The state will pay the difference if the value of 28 mils exceeds 27 percent of the total amount. Tollison criticised this rule Wednesday. He stated: “You’re compounding a problem of making rich district richer and poorer districts with the formula we now have, to the tune about $120million and growing.” Tollison claimed that MAEP is “probably the most inequitable formulas currently in the country because of 27 percent rule which was not part the original formula.” It was a component of the bill’s passage. Many lawmakers were open to the idea of phasing out or stripping HB 957, but Tollison and the other leaders who handled the bill stated that they weren’t ready to do so at the time. House Education chairman Rep. Richard Bennett (R-Long Beach) told representatives that he was open for further study of the rule but that removing it immediately would be disastrous. He stated that MAEP was “not a fair formula by any stretch” and the last day of the 2018 legislative session will be April 1.