One formula decides how much state money every public school in Louisiana gets. It is called the Minimum Foundation Program. Here is what it is, what it does, and what it means for our schools.
The Minimum Foundation Program is a math formula written into the state constitution. It hands out more than $4 billion a year. Almost every state dollar our schools get comes through it.
It does not decide how a school spends its money. It decides how much each school system gets in the first place.
Ouachita Parish has two school systems. Monroe City Schools teaches the kids inside the city. Ouachita Parish Schools teaches the kids outside it. Far more of Monroe City’s students are low-income. Yet it gets a little less state money per student.
Why would the system with more low-income kids get less? Because the formula does two things at once. First it gives Monroe City extra credit for those students. Then it takes back what it thinks the city could raise in taxes. And Monroe is where the whole parish shops. The stores cancel out the kids. Scroll on and watch it happen.
Watch what happens to one Monroe City student’s funding. The picture sticks; the steps scroll.
The state prices a year of school at $4,015 per student. Same number in every parish. It has not been raised since 2019, and it does not go up with prices.
A child with a disability counts as 2.5 students. A low-income child counts as 1.22. A gifted child counts as 1.6. Monroe City’s kids carry more of these than most. Its average child counts as 1.52 students, worth $6,114.
The state does not pay that whole bill. It asks a what-if: if a standard tax rate were charged on the property and store sales around you, what would it raise? For Monroe City the answer is $1,809 per student. That comes off the bill — whether or not anyone collects those taxes.
Monroe City ends at $4,305 per student. Run Ouachita Parish through the same steps and it ends at $4,400. The subtraction took back almost everything the weights added. The system with more low-income kids gets a check $96 smaller — because it has the bigger stores.
Some children cost more to teach. So the formula counts them as more than one student. A child with a disability counts as one student plus 1.5 more — the school is paid for 2.5 students. Check the boxes and watch the count change.
Welding, nursing, computer classes and the like, in high school. Each class adds 6% — about $241 — and only counts if the student takes it both fall and spring.
| What the formula counts | Students it adds | Money it counts |
|---|
One child can check more than one box. The real formula does this for a whole school system at once, but the math is the same.
One more boost, for small systems. A small school system still needs a leader, buses and a payroll office. So systems with fewer than 7,500 students get extra for every student — the smaller the system, the bigger the boost, up to 20%. Monroe City has about 7,900 funded students and Ouachita Parish about 17,200, so neither one gets it.
The state does not pay the whole cost from step 2. It splits that bill with your local school system. Across the whole state, the split comes out near 65 cents state, 35 cents local. That is the MFP’s own split, not all school funding. Count every source, including federal, and Louisiana schools run closer to 44 cents state, 43 local, and the rest federal. But every system gets its own split, and step 3 is how each one is set.
The state looks at two things in your area: what the property is worth, and how much the stores sell. Then it asks a what-if question: if one standard tax rate were charged on all of that, how much money would come in? Whatever the answer is — that is your share of the bill. The state pays the rest.
The state never asked what taxes your schools really collect. Your share is set by what your area could raise, not what it does raise. So a school system surrounded by busy stores gets handed a big share — even when its students are low-income. Stores do not follow kids home.
It leans on sales tax. About 54 cents of it comes from sales tax and 43 cents from property, with the last 3 cents from other local revenue. Louisiana takes the first $75,000 of a home's value off the parish tax bill, one of the most generous breaks in the country. So there is less property to tax, and schools lean hard on stores.
It uses old numbers. The property and sales figures come from finished audits, usually about two years old. A town whose economy just changed still gets money based on how things used to be.
The check you just watched get written is called Level 1. It is the main event — about 60 cents of every state school dollar. Three smaller kinds of money ride on top, and the formula calls those levels too. Here is the whole $4 billion.
At least 70 cents of every dollar has to reach the school. Not the district office. That is one of the few spending rules written into the formula itself.
Monroe City does get credit for its students. It has more low-income kids, and it counts more gifted kids. Every Monroe City child counts as 1.52 students. In Ouachita Parish it is 1.41.
Then each system is handed its share of the bill. Flip between the two and watch that step change the answer.
| Per student, 2025–26 | Monroe City | Ouachita Parish |
|---|
Store sales. The mall, the big-box stores, the car lots. The parish’s shopping sits inside the city limits, in Monroe City’s district. People drive in from all over to spend money there.
The what-if test from step 3 counts all of those sales. It treats them as money Monroe City schools could tax. Per student, Monroe City has 1.83 times the store sales Ouachita Parish has. So the formula hands it the bigger share. The shoppers come from everywhere. The kids do not.
This does not mean Monroe City schools are broke. Counting local taxes too, Monroe City has more money per student: $10,216 against $9,582. The point here is narrower. One part of the formula is built to send extra state money where the need is greatest. Here it gets cancelled out by a shopping district — one that has nothing to do with the kids in the classrooms.
Not the ones you would guess. Gifted students add $178.55. Low-income students add $168.84. Students with disabilities add $127.01. Job training takes $4.55 back off. So that is not even the largest piece. Monroe City counts 10.3% of its students as gifted; Ouachita Parish counts 2.8%. The formula records those counts, not the reason behind them.
Since 2016 Monroe City has lost 443 students and Ouachita Parish has lost 2,300 — about 5% and 12%. The money follows the head count, but the buildings and bus routes stay. When the state checked its count last October it took $872,436 back from Monroe City and $1,730,430 from Ouachita Parish.
Two groups share the power over the formula. And one quiet rule matters as much as either of them.
BESE builds the formula each year and sends it to lawmakers. The $4,015 and the extra counts are set here.
They can pass it, turn it down, or do nothing. They cannot change it. It is yes or no on what the board sent.
If they turn it down or never vote, the last one they passed stays in force. The formula running our schools today was passed in 2022.
That catch is why we are still on the 2022 formula. BESE has sent up a new one three years running. Each asked for more money than the formula already in force: $259 million more in 2023, $71 million in 2024, about $50 million in 2025. None of the three was adopted. Each time the old formula rolled forward on its own.
None of those formulas asked to raise the $4,015 itself. They asked for more in other places — teacher pay, and costs the state makes schools cover. So the base has never been voted down. And the asks got smaller every year.
Twice the state has tried to lock in teacher raises by changing the constitution, and twice voters said no. In March 2025 they turned it down 65% to 35%. In May 2026 they turned down a second version, 58% to 42%. This June, lawmakers went home without a teacher pay plan, and the governor signed an order moving $168 million out of what school systems spend to keep the lights on, then paying it back out as teacher bonuses.
On August 13 a 15-person task force met for the first time to study the whole formula and find a lasting way to pay teachers more. Its ideas are due January 1, 2027. It is the hardest look at school funding in a generation, and it is happening right now.
The formula does two jobs, and only one of them is visible. It counts your students. Everyone gets that part. Then it subtracts what your area could raise in taxes. That second step decides most of the outcome, and almost nobody sees it.
For our two school systems, those jobs nearly cancel out. Monroe City’s students earn $470 more per child. Its share of the bill takes $565 back. That is not a mistake or a mix-up. It is the formula doing what it was written to do.
And the number it all starts from has not moved since 2019. Three new formulas have gone up since then. Each asked for more money than the one in force. None was adopted, so $4,015 is still the price of a school year in Louisiana.
The formula. How it works — the $4,015, the extra student counts, the subtraction — comes from House Concurrent Resolution 23 of the 2022 session, the last formula lawmakers passed and the one still in force. The 65/35 split and the two-year data lag come from the state's MFP budget letters; the wider 44/43 state-local share is the education department’s own long-standing description of all school funding.
The rejected formulas. BESE adopted and sent up a new formula in 2023, 2024 and 2025. None was adopted, so the 2022 formula stayed in force. Each asked for more money overall, and each expressly kept the base at $4,015. Figures from the Legislative Fiscal Office notes on those resolutions.
The local numbers. Every per-student figure comes from the state's MFP budget letter for 2025–26, tables 3, 6 and 7 — the state's own workbook. Student counts and economically disadvantaged percentages come from the education department's October 2025 enrollment report. The same pattern shows up in the 2024–25 workbook, so this is how the formula works and not a one-year fluke.
What is math, not a quote. Per-student figures are the state's totals divided by its own student counts. The 1.52 and 1.41 counts, the $470 and $565 gaps and the 1.83 times figure are arithmetic on those published numbers. Different pieces come from different years, so where they are compared the direction is right even if the cents are not exact. The $168 million order is Executive Order JML 26-047; the task force is Senate Concurrent Resolution 80.
Check it yourself. The formula, the budget letters and the district tables are all public on the Louisiana Department of Education's website. If a number here is wrong, tell me and I’ll fix it.