Bill to have community college leaders create aid distribution formula moves ahead

A bill handing the development of community college aid distribution formulas to community college leaders will head to the Iowa Senate floor after moving through committee.

The Senate Appropriations Committee passed Senate File 2373, which would strike current code on the formula determining state funding allocations for each of the state’s community colleges and form a council of community college presidents and chancellors to determine the formula on a yearly basis.

As amended, the bill would have this presidents council consider college enrollments, combined support and other relevant factors when determining the formula, and no college will receive fewer allocated funds than in previous years unless the base funding allocation itself has been reduced, Sen. Tim Kraayenbrink, R-Fort Dodge, said.

At least 10 of the 15 community college leaders would need to approve the formula for it to head to the Department of Education for implementation, according to the bill, and if a consensus cannot be reached by Oct. 31 each year, the department will determine the formula instead.

Kraayenbrink said during the committee meeting that the bill came to lawmakers from the community colleges, and schools that could see either increases or decreases in appropriations are fully backing it.

“The neat thing is that all 15 of the college presidents and chancellors voted 100% to support this, and very rarely do you get 100% of anybody that’s on a winning or losing side to support something that they believe in so much, and I think with the newness of our a lot of our presidents and chancellors and community colleges, I think that they saw something that needed to be addressed,” Kraayenbrink said.

Sen. Cindy Winckler, D-Davenport, reiterated concerns she had previously expressed in subcommittee meetings about how students concurrently enrolled in high school and college courses would factor into the formula, as they are counted in community college enrollment for funding but the money those programs generate come through K-12 channels.

She said she’d like to see concurrent programming represented in combined support when creating the formula, and that lawmakers continue to have access to breakdowns of how much funding each college would see under the new formula each year to be informed during the budgeting process. Kraayenbrink said they should be able to cover these concerns as the bill moves ahead.

Updating the distribution formula and giving it more flexibility year-over-year was one of the community college system’s priorities for this legislative session, Indian Hills Community College President Matt Thompson said. His college is one that has been weighted at a higher level than others with the current funding formula, he said, and the goal of these changes is to provide more equity across the board.

Thompson said the community colleges are seeking a $10 million increase in state aid this year, higher than in past sessions, in order to more quickly reach an equilibrium. Half of the funds would go to helping this balance and the rest would be put into maintaining programs and handling higher costs.

“We have received really unanimous support through the presidents through the work that we’ve done to try to determine a solution that helps all of us across the state of Iowa maintain the high quality programming that we offer our community colleges,” Thompson said.

©Copyright 2024, Iowa Capital Dispatch. Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Read more at iowacapitaldispatch.com.