What is School Funding

Why is school funding in K-12 schools important? School funding is basically the amount of money a school gets and it is measured by how much funding a school gets per student that attends.

Schools are funded by a few areas of government. According to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, 47% of school funding comes from the state government, 46% comes from the local government, and 7% comes from the federal government. Most of these funds for schools come from property taxes.

The problem that exists with school funding is the gap between groups in the United States, specifically between disenfranchised groups and enfranchised groups. Minority students and students that come from low-income families don't have access to or the ability to be able to send their kids to schools with the best funding and this tends to result in these kids going to schools without good funding.

My Interest

When learning about school funding, I was shocked by how low Colorado was in terms of school funding and how low it compared to all of the other states in terms of funding.

According to NPR, Colorado spends, on average, $9,120 per student, which is over $2,000 less than the national average, which is $11.841 per student. The school district that I went to, spent about $7,562 per student which is the 3rd or 4th lowest in the state with what I could find.

This was very shocking to me with how little funding the state of Colorado has for their schools, and how little the school district I attended had for their schools. Colorado ranks 33rd in all states for average funding across the state. However, when you adjust for regional cost differences, Colorado ranks 43rd in all states in the U.S. for per-student funding.

These reasons made me want to do this final website project on student funding in K-12 schools because of just how shockingly low Colorado is for funding as compared to the expectations that I had for it. In states like New York, when looking at the map from NPR, school districts are almost all green(above the national average or way above the national average), while Colorado is mostly orange and red (under and way under the national average) in the densely populated areas.