After 30 years of letting a sleeping dog lie, the legislature, with House Speaker Julie McCluskie as chief sponsor, awakened the pooch on April 11 with a bill to revise the state’s 1994 public school finance formula.

The once-in-a-30-year bill was introduced with about three weeks left in the session, generally a signal it’s long and complicated and that no one should examine it too closely. The object of the bill is clearly worthy: to change the basis of the public-school finance formula to reflect the challenges of educating at-risk children including Free/Reduced Lunch (FRL), English language learning (ELL), and special education students (SPED). There’s $500 million over time for this re-arrangement of the bill’s money pot to produce education equity, but none of the money comes from new sources. Plus, the bill doesn’t put rules, guidelines or any boundaries at all on how the at-risk money will ultimately be spent.

These problems with the bill occupy the “are we really going to do it this way” space.

The bill places at-risk factors for per-pupil funding at the top of the extra-money priority list in the school finance formula and increases the factors’ values from their current low number to 0.25 for each element.

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With the amount of funding set as a base for each student at about $8,700, the 0.25 increase is substantial for FRL, ELL and SPED category students. Ironically, it’s this substantial increase and change in where Colorado’s public education finance system places value that will create unsettling consequences as free-market principles collide with availability of more public taxpayer dollars without sufficient oversight. The bill makes at-risk children more valuable than other students in terms of how much money they bring to districts and charter schools educating them. That’s enticing in a free market economy.

Denver Public Schools has about 70% of its children in at-risk categories, many of them in two categories — FRL and ELL. Some will be in three categories. All Denver schools, whether they have large numbers of at-risk kids or not, and whether they’re district or charter, will receive the same amount of per-pupil dollars. The bill will certainly benefit Denver’s networks of charter schools, boosting their budgets to the tops even though they are governed by unelected boards operating with automatic waivers from state and district policy.

Other districts with high numbers of FRL and ELL students will likely experience the free market a little differently. The at-risk students will punch up the total budgets of public districts like Adams 14, Mapleton, Harrison and some in El Paso and Pueblo counties. Their per-student dollars will be much higher due to at-risk funding than for districts such as Jefferson County, Cherry Creek and Littleton with fewer at-risk kids.

The districts with few charters but lots of at-risk kids will definitely become targets for charter expansion because these are the locations where charters can get the most money per student without regulations as to how they will spend the money. Further, once students are classified in the at-risk category, they represent the same dollar value no matter how small or great their risk actually is. Charter schools that have means of vetting their populations will seek the least expensive at-risk children for enrollment, leaving “riskier” children to public district schools. SPED children will be the least desirable for recruitment as they are generally the most expensive to educate.

To make this more complicated, some charter networks have schools with lots of at-risk kids and schools with very low numbers of at-risk children. With the bill as currently written, there’s no obligation for these networks to put the additional at-risk money to work for the at-risk kids. These charter networks can funnel the extra money away from at-risk kids and who’s going to do anything about it?

Meanwhile, as always with free-market systems, there are losers. In this case, the losers are not losers because they’re doing bad jobs of educating kids. They are losers because they don’t have as many at-risk children to educate. Large to medium districts, especially suburban districts, are also losers because they’re not rural and small. The bill as written puts in substantially more money for remote, small rural districts than for districts with more than 6,000 students. This decision reinforces Colorado’s quandary of spending lots more money on 135,000 rural students than on the 745,000 students who live in metro areas.

The bill’s sponsors, all of whom are supporters of alternative public school options, give some charters another nice present. Many large districts that will lose money because they’re large and lack high numbers of at-risk students nevertheless educate more at-risk students than charters in their districts do. These districts are dinged not only because they’re large, but also because their charter schools will receive the same total per-pupil funding as district schools while the charters work with fewer at-risk students. No wonder the charter school industry is all in on the bill and suburban districts have been in opposition.

Again, the bill’s goals are worthy — equity for children who come to school with too many challenges. But the bill creates its own set of problems mainly because guardrails against abuse are missing and the bill does not address “adequacy,” or making certain every district has the proper amount of money to do a good job. The bill rearranges the deck chairs and doesn’t repair the hole in the hull causing the ship to go down.

If bill sponsors had given the bill more time for vetting and correction, HB24-1448 wouldn’t be so vexing. The Senate has time to work the bill after it leaves the House. It’s unlikely Senate sponsors Paul Lundeen and Rachel Zenzinger will welcome changes to the problems outlined above. At the very least, they should put a sunset on the bill so 30 years don’t go by before another legislature examines this formula to determine whether it’s doing what it’s supposed to.

Paula Noonan owns Colorado Capitol Watch, the state’s premier legislature tracking platform.