SCHOOLS

exceeds that amount by just a couple dollars must pay for their student’s meals while families right below it are guaranteed free school meals.

Free and reduced-price lunch as a measure also does not parse out di erent levels of poverty or account for the varying needs of students coping with di erent degrees of hardship, Colwell added.

Frank Reeves, another workgroup member and former superintendent of East Grand School District in Granby, recalls how challenging it was to collect forms from families, including those from Mexico who feared lling out paperwork and being deported. Others living in poverty also felt exposed.

“ ere’s just a point of pride for families,” Reeves said, “and it’s really tough to get some families to apply knowing that they qualify.” e workgroup, composed of members from education groups as well as state agencies including the Colorado Department of Education, the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing and the Colorado Department of Human Services, aimed to revise and expand who exactly ts into a school’s at-risk student population.

One proposed component would incorporate kids who are directly certi ed — including those who re- ceive government aid through SNAP, TANF and the Migrant Education Program as well as homeless students and children in foster care.

However, participation rates in those government programs are low among qualifying kids in the state, Colwell said.

“We would see a pretty dramatic drop in the numbers of kids who are counted because of the low participation rates” if Colorado based its at-risk student population solely on direct certi cation, she said.

Another option would allow Medicaid, the joint state and federal government health insurance program for people with low income, to be added to the list of programs under direct certi cation. So all Colorado kids enrolled in Medicaid would ultimately be labeled at-risk students.

“Even before the public health emergency, Medicaid had a higher uptake than other public programs,” said Erin Miller, vice president of health initiatives for the Colorado Children’s Campaign.

Colwell is hopeful that the state could capture more at-risk students through Medicaid than the number of students calculated through the current system of free and reducedprice lunch forms.

But there are a couple caveats. Efforts to create a new at-risk student funding formula have been hampered by a lack of data, with state agencies working to tally up the number of students enrolled in Medicaid by school district. e data lag ultimately prevented the workgroup from crafting a new way to determine at-risk students, since districts will rst need an understanding of how those Medicaid enrollment numbers will impact their funding. e decision to postpone changes spared districts from potentially bigger problems in the future, said Reeves, the former East Grand superintendent who now serves as director of rural recruitment for the Public Education & Business Coalition and operations manager for the Colorado Rural Schools Alliance.

Reeves feared that any premature recommendations to the legislature could end with “drastic unknown consequences if we don’t have actual numbers and runs.” e workgroup, which wrapped up in January, also looked into using a much more expansive set of factors that de ne student need in much greater detail. ose elements include how much money a student’s family earns; how often a student’s family relocates; how far a student’s parents progressed through their own schooling; how much money a student’s family spends on housing; whether a child is adopted, in foster care or living with relatives other than their biological parents; whether a student’s family shares their home with another family; and what language is primarily spoken at home.

Additionally, many children who have been covered by Medicaid during the pandemic will likely be among more than 300,000 Coloradans who could soon lose coverage with the end of the federally declared Public Health Emergency.

“We’ll probably see this dip especially among kid enrollment” possibly followed by an increase as people re-enroll once they realize they no longer have coverage, Miller said.

A decline in the number of children bene ting from Medicaid would likely impact Medicaid enrollment gures by district, but there are ways to work around any decreases. One idea is to use the enrollment numbers that predate kids losing their coverage, Colwell said.

Next year, after another workgroup sorts out other parts of Colorado’s school nance formula during the interim months, policymakers must decide how much funding for at-risk students is driven by enrollment in public bene ts programs, such as Medicaid, and how much is determined by other factors of poverty, like mobility and housing costs. Reeves is certain that once changes go into e ect during the 2024-25 school year, most Colorado districts will be impacted.

“I believe in every district there are more at-risk students than what we are counting.” is story from e Colorado Sun, www.ColoradoSun.com. e Colorado Sun is a partner in the Colorado News Conservancy, which owns Colorado Community Media.