- The total allocated to education this year will provide nearly $230 million more for K-12 schools, bringing the total to about $2.96 billion.
Gov. Tate Reeves (R) signed HB 4130 into law this week, establishing a new system for funding K-12 education in Mississippi.
Effective July 1, the Mississippi Student Funding Formula replaces the Mississippi Appropriate Education Program (MAEP) as the annual funding mechanism for public schools.
Governor Reeves told the Magnolia Tribune that he was proud to sign the bill.
“While I have been governor, you have heard me speak about the importance of funding students, not systems. That is the purpose of this bill, and that is why I am writing this bill. That’s why I signed,” Reeves said.
The governor believes the new funding formula will help the state build on the “Mississippi miracle and the record academic achievements happening in our state.”
“Today is another good day for education in Mississippi,” Governor Reeves said.
The Mississippi Student Fund formula and the total amount allocated to education this year will provide nearly $230 million more to K-12 schools, bringing the total amount to approximately $2.96 billion.
The new formula owes much of its structure to the INSPIRE Act, a proposal passed by the Mississippi House of Representatives earlier this Congress. The first year provides students with her base funding of $6,695. It also creates a set of “weights” that increase the funding available to certain categories of students whose education is considered more expensive. These weighted categories include special needs students, low-income students, English language learners, and more.
For example, MAEP previously offered a 5% weight to low-income students. Under the new formula, low-income students are subject to a 30% contribution, which is an additional $2,008 on top of the student's base cost.
Base student funding will increase in 2026, 2027, and 2028 based on inflation. Starting in 2029 and every four years thereafter, the State Board of Education will recommend new student aid thresholds based on a new “objective formula” that takes into account instructional, administrative and facility costs. It turns out. The Mississippi Senate insisted on including this new “objective formula” as part of a compromise with the House.
Teach Plus Mississippi, a state education policy advocacy group, praised the new funding formula, saying Mississippi finally has a formula to adequately and equitably fund public school students.
“This new formula is simpler and more flexible for administrators, while also significantly increasing funding for low-income and special education students. And for the first time, English Learners state funding,” said Sanford Johnson, Teach Plus Mississippi State Executive Director. “This is not the end of the school funding debate in Mississippi, but the future could look significantly different.”
The image on the right, shared by Teach Plus, shows a snapshot of the weighted funding taken into account in the new Mississippi student funding formula.
Teach Plus was not alone in supporting the bill. A broad coalition, including Empower Mississippi, Mississippi First, Mississippi Center for Public Policy, and Americans for Prosperity, worked in support of the concept throughout the session.
Choosing to repeal MAEP in favor of this new formula has been a longstanding issue in the Mississippi State Capitol. Previous efforts were short-lived and failed because MAEP supporters held it up as if it were the holy grail of education funding.
But MAEP, passed in 1997 and phased in until 2003, was widely seen as an overly complex formula. Progressive education advocates have routinely used the lack of funding to criticize legislators who have failed to “fully fund education” in repeated elections.