If anyone in Western New York should have a good understanding of how New York’s state aid formulas for schools are supposed to work, it’s Christine Schnars.

The longtime Jamestown Public Schools member, however, says that despite her best efforts the state’s foundation aid formula is nearly incomprehensible.

“Like 100 years ago there were like 52 formulas that all worked one on top of another,” Schnars said during last week’s Jamestown Public Schools District board meeting.

“The League of Women Voters asked me to speak on state aid one year. I said sure, and I went home and decided I needed to understand it. In my kitchen I had poster board up all over the walls with different formulas on it and what they did. By the end of it, by the time I was done, I pretty much understood that it was pretty much not understandable. Then, a couple of years later, somebody decided that all those formulas were too many. They came up, they said, with one formula. It’s not (really) one formula. It’s one formula, with 50 pieces, so they really didn’t change much of anything. You’re right. It is something that I bet there aren’t more than five people in the whole state that understand it, Rick Timbs being one of them.”

Bret Apthorpe, district superintendent, shared a similar story of sitting down with Timbs and a certified public accountant while working for another school district.

“I was going to understand it,” Apthorpe said. “After two hours I surrendered. How am I supposed to explain that to the public? (Timbs) is like, ‘Well, there you go.'”

Richard Timbs is executive director of the Statewide School Finance Consortium who previously retired as district superintendent of Erie 2-Chautauqua-Cattaraugus BOCES. He earned degrees from Niagara County Community College, the State University at Geneseo and State University at Brockport and earned his doctorate from Syracuse University.

The fact that Timbs, with three degrees and a doctorate, is one of the few people with the qualifications to truly understand the intricacies of the state’s school funding formulas is a fact that frustrated members of the Jamestown school board.

“I’m not saying this to be funny, either,” said Paul Abbott, Jamestown Public Schools board president. “Dan (Johnson, a fellow school board member) and I sat through one of those trainings and halfway through they lost me. It’s a shell game. They’re trying to confuse you. They’re trying to make it untenable for the average board member or, frankly, the above-average board member to be able to (understand it). You talked earlier about transparency. That’s exactly what that flies in the face of on the state side.”

About two years ago, the Citizens Budget Commission, a non-partisan organization that focuses on New York state and New York City finances, advocated for a better foundation aid formula that could deliver more funding to school districts for what it termed a modest cost. CBC officials wrote that the foundation aid formula relies on outdated data and includes adjustments that have led to state aid to school districts that don’t help districts achieve a sound basic education. The current formula has inconsistent local share calculations that don’t uniformly account for a district’s ability to pay, has arbitrary floors, ceilings, phase-ins and add-ons to aid amounts that distort final distributions, and outdated measures both understate and overstate need in many districts.

Commission officials recommend establishing a more equitable basis for setting the expected local funding, eliminate the arbitrary adjustments and increase the additional resources allocated to the needs of students in poverty.

“Implementing this package of reforms would increase required total annual Foundation Aid by $569 million,” the CBC said in December 2016. “The districts in the wealthiest five deciles would experience a net loss of approximately $1.9 billion that would go to the less wealthy deciles. On a district-by-district basis $2.7 billion would be redirected to districts that need the resources. The poorest decile of districts would receive an increase of almost $1.2 billion.”

That hasn’t yet happened, and the result, as Apthorpe discussed Tuesday, is that state officials can truthfully say they spend more money than any state in the nation on education while local officials can truthfully say they aren’t receiving enough money. The complicated nature of the foundation aid formula muddies the water, and that muddy water becomes a swamp when expense-driven aid is factored into the complicated equation.

“What the governor has been trying to do is lump all state aid together,” Apthorpe said. “He’ll say you’re getting this big increase in state aid. The truth of it is that everything but the 1.4 percent increase in foundation aid is what’s called expense-driven aid. So, we have a mandate to pay for something, say, for example, everybody has to have an (automatic external defibrillator). As I recall they need batteries and software that is like tens of thousands of dollars. The state will say, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll give you aid on that.’ Not all of it, but some of it. That’s the aid that he’s throwing out there as the increase in aid. So they’ll have mandates that come out for the hings that we have to do for buildings, and it’s OK, you get aid on that. But then they’ll turn around and say how much aid we’re giving to schools, That’s when they include the expense–driven aid. It’s frustrating to have it presented in that manner.”