Montana’s School Funding Interim Commission finished fifteen months of work on August 17, and its report was due to lawmakers on September 1. The next Legislature will act on it, and this district has a stake in what happens.

The commission approved ten bill drafts. They cover special education, Indian Education for All, funding for at-risk students, and money for building renovations. Those are four real things, and I will vote for all four.

Indian Education for All is the one I would watch closest. Montana’s constitution commits this state to teaching every student, Native and non-Native, about the distinct heritage of American Indians. The program has run at roughly three and a half million dollars a year for a decade while enrollment and overall school spending grew faster around it. Funding it properly and requiring honest reporting, with tribes at the table, is what the constitution asks of us.

What the commission set aside is the formula itself. Its chair, Rep. David Bedey, called the plan a patchwork and said, “I think we probably have consensus that we need to completely overhaul the funding formula.” Reworking it, he said, would take serious time and energy that fifteen months did not allow.

Members who judged the outcome more harshly landed in a similar place. Sen. Becky Beard, Sen. Sue Vinton of Billings, and Rep. Lee Deming of Laurel wrote in August that the commission fell short of a simpler formula, and that “public involvement didn’t include many parents or average citizens worried about their tax burdens and the educational needs of our students.”

That last part is exactly right, and it is why I am writing this.

Here is how it lands on a Heights street. When the state formula falls short, districts go back to local voters with a levy, and that levy arrives on a property tax bill. School funding and property taxes are one conversation in this district. Treating them as two is how a household pays for the same shortfall twice.

So the 2027 session should be the one that takes the overhaul on. And the people who pay the levy and send the kids belong in the room while it happens.

More brains means more solutions. That is as true in a hearing room in Helena as it is on a front porch in the Heights.

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