by Kim Jarrett
The Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations delayed a vote Thursday that could have required the Tennessee Department of Education to track the residency of virtual school students.
Virtual school students are counted in the county where the school is, not where the student resides, which can skew the state’s funding formula for education.
The Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement (TISA) funding formula took effect during the 2023-24 school year. The base funding is $7,205 per student for the 2025-26 school year.
The state school funding formula is calculated using base funding, weighted funding, direct funding, and outcomes funding. They way virtual school students are currently counted affects base funding.
Smaller counties with virtual schools, like Union and Johnson counties, could benefit, researchers said.
Union County, with a population of around 21,000, has the largest population of virtual schools, researchers told the commission. But nearly all of the 2,685 virtual students do not live in Union County. Johnson County also has a large percentage of students in virtual schools.
“The effect of including their virtual school students in the fiscal capacity calculations, keeping all else the same, was an increase in state funding for Union and Johnson counties and decrease in state funding for the other 93 counties,” research director Michael Mount said in a presentation to the commission in June.
Earlier this year, Tennessee became one of the first states to pass a universal school choice program. Governor Bill Lee and legislative leaders said the Education Freedom Scholarship Act would ensure parents — not bureaucrats — make the ultimate decisions about their children’s education. “Every child should have an opportunity for a quality education that meets their needs, and I strongly believe the ultimate decision should be made by parents, not government bureaucrats,” House Speaker Cameron Sexton said in February.
Parents appear eager to exercise that freedom. When the scholarship program opened for applications in May, Tennessee families submitted more than 33,000 applications for just 20,000 slots. Lee called the response “a success,” adding: “Tennessee parents want choices when it comes to their child’s education.”
Dr. Cliff Lippard, executive director of the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, asked the commission to delay the vote that would require the education department to track virtual school residency. Staff members have additional considerations, he said.
“Members of the subcommittee asked the commission staff for a further analysis regarding whether out-of-state students are enrolled in virtual schools in Tennessee,” Lippard said. “And this request was made because in our initial analysis, we found a handful of students in one virtual school, four or five students that their residency address that we obtained from the county shows their residency as out-of-state. As we said at the subcommittee meeting, we felt as if this was some kind of glitch in reporting and that’s what we are being told.”
Republican leaders say accountability is also part of the equation. Private schools participating in the Education Freedom Scholarship program must meet academic testing and reporting requirements, and lawmakers insist they will track results. “If you are going to take those public funds, then there should be some accountability in that,” Sen. Jon Lundberg (R-Bristol) said in March 2024, pointing to metrics that will allow Tennesseans to see what is working and what is not.
The school funding formula also affects counties with large tourism industries. Davidson, home of Nashville, and Sevier County, home to the Smoky Mountains, have larger sales tax bases that increase their fiscal capacity to fund education, which, all else being equal, decreases their state share of funding, researchers said in a report.
The commission also looked at the effect of Greenbelt property assessments on the funding formula. Greenbelt assessments consider the value of the property based on its current use, rather than its highest and best use.
Researchers said “decreasing residential or farm property assessment, for Greenbelt purposes or for any other reason, decreases the county’s property tax base and decreases residential and farm property as a percentage of total assessments. These two effects partially offset each other, and the effect on state funding varies across counties.”
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Kim Jarrett is an associate editor at The Center Square. Christina Botteri contributed to this report and is the Executive Editor of The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network.
Photo “After School” by Harrison Keely CC4.0.
“The commission also looked at the effect of Greenbelt property assessments on the funding formula. Greenbelt assessments consider the value of the property based on its current use, rather than its highest and best use.”
How many are taxed based on what someone else thinks they should be doing with their land, rather than what is? And yes, the word “is” does have meaning. Reality is, while “he/she should be …” isn’t. Such positions seem nothing more than theft.