What is Foundation Aid?
New York State’s Current Foundation Aid Formula
The “Foundation Aid” formula was developed to comply with the court’s ruling in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case and provide constitutional funding for general education service to schools and districts in New York State. To implement the ruling, in 2007 state law reformed the method of allocating resources to school districts by consolidating some 30 aid programs into a Foundation Aid formula that distributes funds to school districts based on the cost of providing an adequate education.
AIR offers a clear summary of how New York State’s current Foundation Aid formula works in its first research report. The starting point or “base amount” for calculating the funding for each school district is determined by identifying the average amount spent by “efficient successful school districts,” which is then increased by a cumulative inflation factor. This base amount, which in 2023-2024 was $7,821 per pupil, is then adjusted to account for differences among districts. It is multiplied by a “Pupil Need Index” (PNI), to reflect differences in student needs, and a “Regional Cost Index,” to account for differences in labor costs, to produce an “Adjusted Foundation Amount.”
π΄πππ’π π‘ππ πΉππ’ππππ‘πππ π΄πππ’ππ‘=π΅ππ π π΄πππ’ππ‘∗ππ’πππ ππππ πΌππππ₯∗π πππππππ πΆππ π‘ πΌππππ₯
The Pupil Need Index is designed to help districts support the costs of educating certain groups of students with additional educational needs. For this purpose, those groups are defined as students in poverty and English language learners (ELLs). The PNI also includes a “sparsity factor” for districts that have very low enrollments per square mile. The Regional Cost Index is intended to account for geographic differences in the competitive wages needed to pay educators; it divides the state into nine geographic regions and increases a district’s base amount by different percentages depending on their geographic region if the region’s comparative labor costs as calculated by the index. are above the level of the lowest cost regions, which are the Mohawk Valley and the North County.
The Adjusted Foundation Amount does not account for extra costs of educating students with disabilities (SWDs). This is calculated by applying a weighting to the Adjusted Foundation Amount based on SWD enrollment numbers. Each SWD is counted as 1.41 average-need students, thereby providing additional funding to districts serving greater numbers of SWDs.
(Source: NYSED, State Aid to Schools A Primer (2023), P. 32)
(1) The poverty count is based on a combination of 0.65 times a district’s number of students qualifying for free and reduced price school meals and 0.65 a district’s number of students meeting the poverty definition in the 2000 census.