Campaign aims to educate on Montana school funding process

How schools are funded is complicated, and as lawmakers are in the last six months of working on potential changes to the formula, a new campaign is working to get Montanans educated and engaged in the process.

Three Helena moms, two on the local school board and one education expert, recently founded the “Montana Loves Public Schools” campaign to create a website with video content and other resources aimed at educating Montanans on the current school funding formula.

The campaign says its goal is to help Montanans learn about and participate in the meetings lawmakers are conducting as part of a once-every-decade effort to study and recommend changes to the formula for legislators to consider during the 2027 session.

"Our mission is to help Montanans understand the way taxes, school funding and state law intersect to produce the kind of impossible situations that parents and educators in Montana are all too familiar with," according to the campaign website. "We want to help Montanans take action at a time when lawmakers want and need to hear from all of us."

The organization cites low levy passage rates and lower per-pupil spending compared to neighboring states as reasons the formula needs to be updated.

A modern funding formula would keep up with real inflation, pay the costs for special needs instruction, and reduce facility concerns, according to the website, which also says it aims to address misinformation around how school funding works.

Outgoing Helena School Board Chairwoman and campaign co-founder Jennifer McKee described the formula as a “spaghetti bowl of misunderstanding.”

“There's so many intricacies,” she said. “The whole effort behind this is to explain it to people in a clear way, so that an everyday person can understand how their school is funded — what's working, what's not — and also see how I can get involved right now.”

The organization’s website lists answers to questions around school funding, such as:

• If my property taxes keep going up, why aren’t schools getting more money?
• Would changing the school funding formula mean higher taxes for me?
• Isn’t the real problem budget mismanagement and too much administrative bloat?

The organization isn’t taking a stance on how the formula should be changed, McKee said, adding there are benefits to the current formula like its effort to be “equitable.”

“It is equitable, only, 21 years on, everyone is equally disadvantaged,” she said with a laugh.

The most important thing that people need is just to understand how it works, she said.

The group launched on social media the day after the school elections earlier this month, saying in a post, “If you voted for your school levy on Tuesday - thank you! If you didn’t, we totally understand. There’s a better way to pay for schools in Montana - and it starts with understanding what we’re doing now.”

In addition to answering common questions about the formula, which McKee said can be “dense,” the website also provides videos.

One explains how the School Funding Interim Committee is holding meetings reviewing the funding formula.

“Our schools haven’t been failing, our funding formula just hasn’t kept up,” the video says. “Costs have changed. The formula hasn’t.”

Other videos highlight how Montana schools are often the biggest employers in small towns, “cut them, you cut everything.”

Levies

McKee said she understands why communities would vote no on a school levy, but said the way the formula works, schools have to “beg” for funds from taxpayers who are “tapped out” with increased property taxes in recent years.

“No one did this on purpose, but we're 21 years in, and we can all tell that it doesn't work,” she said.

The state funds about 80% of a school district’s budget, and school boards can ask taxpayers to vote to support funding the remaining 20% through local levies.

Some communities, like Missoula, can consistently ask their tax base to vote for levies to get their funding to 100% of what they need to run and the community more often than not supports it. But other school districts don't see the same support.

If levies fail, some districts have no other option but to make cuts to staff.

“If you live in the district that will pass them, you end up further down the road than places that don't,” McKee said.

School district levy requests earlier this month saw mixed results, with Missoula and Bozeman voting to support them, while voters in the Flathead and Billings shot them down.

Levies have been approved less and less in the last 20 years. A study from the Montana School Board Association released prior to this year’s results found levy passage rates have dropped from 90% before the 2008 recession to 50% in some districts in the last three years.

The Coalition of Advocates for Montana's Public Schools (CAMPS) has proposed changing the way schools are funded so the state would cover 100% of what districts need to run, and the districts could ask taxpayers for funds for additional needs beyond the necessities.

This change would increase the state’s current $2.5 billion by another $1.7 billion, according to the coalition’s proposed funding model. McKee said the campaign wasn’t endorsing a specific plan on how the formula should be fixed, including the one proposed by the CAMPS.

Teacher pay and support

McKee said teachers are shouldering the brunt of levies failing in Montana, as the Treasure State pays less per pupil than its neighbors in Wyoming and North Dakota.

The 2025 Legislature passed the STARS Act, which allotted $100 million in funds for qualifying districts who pay starting teachers nearly $42,000.

This investment was intended to address starting teacher pay in the state, which for a time was 34th lowest in the country at around $39,000, according to a report released this month examining data from 2024.

The 2024 data showed real wages fell nearly 2% for teachers between the 2017-18 and the 2022-23 school years, while workforce shortages in other sectors in the state drove “significant wage gains as businesses compete for a limited supply of workers,” the report said.

“Negative real wage growth means that prices went up faster than wages, reducing purchasing power and standard of living,” the report said. “Persistently low salaries contribute to teacher turnover.”

More than 25% of teachers work a second job to supplement their income and about 8% leave teaching in public schools each year. The report estimated there is slated to be demand for about 4,400 positions in education and childcare between 2024 and 2034.

Since 2022 there has been a nearly 80% increase in teaching positions filled with emergency authorizations in 2025, according to data from the Office of Public Instruction. Emergency authorizations are used when a district can’t fill a teaching position with a licensed teacher, and must be filled by someone with experience as a teacher, paraprofessional or student teacher.

Some Montana districts will get additional apprentices in classrooms in the next school year.

Using $1 million in federal funds through the U.S. Department of Labor’s State Apprenticeship Expansion Formula (SAEF) program, nearly 80 apprentices will be in classrooms alongside teacher mentors in 26 Montana school districts, the governor’s office announced last week.

The public can provide written comment on the school funding formula process or speak during designated times in meetings in person or via Zoom. The commission’s next meeting is June 17.