Leaders of Mississippi News non-profits indicated Wednesday that they do not plan to make significant changes to the House’s proposal for school funding as it progresses in the legislative process. Questions have been swirling about Senate plans for the formula since House Bill 957 was passed by the House last month. Even among senators, Gray Tollison, the Chairman of Senate Education Committee, finally stated that there would not be any “substantial modifications” to the bill with Tuesday’s deadline. Tollison (R-Oxford) did mention that a few provisions in the bill are still being drafted. One is how schools districts with dramatically increasing enrollments would be funded in the next fiscal year. House Bill 957 would ensure that no school district will lose money over the next two-years from the current year’s funding levels. This formula will not be implemented before fiscal year 2021. However, the same amount of funding would adversely impact “high-growth” school districts such as Madison County. Tollison stated that the issue was being addressed. Tollison clarified that there would not be an attempt to eliminate the 27 percent rule, which requires the state to fund property-rich districts that have the local tax base to raise funds locally. The most opposition to the rewrite spent Wednesday’s meeting asking Tollison and EdBuild CEO Rebecca Sibilia questions about the new formula. Democratic Senator David Blount from Jackson repeatedly asked why EdBuild provided numbers. This was the school finance group hired by the Legislature to make recommendations for a new formula. He wanted to compare actual education appropriations with the new formula rather than what the state’s current formula (the Mississippi Adequate Education Programme (MAEP)) would provide. Blount stated that an apples-to-apples comparison would be to compare the numbers according to full funding for MAEP. Blount also pointed out that although estimates suggest that the new formula will produce $108 million more in schools than the amount appropriated for the current fiscal year (which is about $108m less), that number depends on the enrollment numbers remaining the same in each school district. This number would not be realized fully until fiscal year 2026. Sibilia stated that 107 of the 142 schools districts would receive more money for fiscal year 2026, as per her estimates. Thirty-five of the 35 districts that would be receiving less money have declining enrollments, and five are subject to a “hold harmless” provision in current law which prohibits them from getting less than what they received in 2002. Many people have noted that House Bill 957’s appropriations would be much lower than MAEP. According to The Parents’ Campaign, the amount would be $292 Million less than MAEP in its first year of implementation. The Senate Education Committee will meet Monday or Tuesday to vote on the bill and discuss it before Tuesday’s deadline to report the bill out of the committee.