Public School Forum Releases Two-Year Study of Weighted School Funding for North Carolina, Modeling Base Amounts From $5,133 to $9,450 Per Student

Two Studies, Four Numbers, and One Disagreement About Who Cuts the Check

North Carolina's disability funding for schools runs into a wall most parents never see. Districts get roughly $5,300 a year for every student with a disability — but only for up to 13% of their enrollment^[3]. A district where a fifth of its students have disabilities gets state money for 13 out of every 100 kids. The rest generate nothing extra, no matter how much they cost to teach.

That single number is the strongest argument in a fight that has been building for years. On Wednesday, August 27, 2026, the Public School Forum of North Carolina released a two-year study proposing a different way to pay for schools^[1]. It's called weighted student funding, and the report models four versions of it. The cheapest would spend about what the state spends now. The most expensive would spend $1.7 billion more a year. Both count as the same reform.

What "Weighted" Actually Means, and Why the Base Number Is the Whole Fight

Right now, North Carolina funds schools through roughly 50 separate allotments^[1][6]. Some send districts dollars. Some send teaching positions instead of dollars. Some are tied to specific programs. A district's total funding is the sum of dozens of these streams, each with its own eligibility rule.

Weighted student funding collapses that into one idea. Every district gets a base dollar amount for every student. On top of that, the state adds a percentage more for students who cost more to teach — those with disabilities, those from low-income families, and those still learning English^[1][3]. One formula, one number per student, adjusted by who that student is.

The Forum's report doesn't pick one version of this. It models four, all sharing the same weights but starting from different base amounts. The low end is $5,133 per student, which the report calls revenue-neutral — the state would spend about what it spends today, just distributed differently^[1]. The high end is $9,450, the amount the report says would bring North Carolina up to the national average for funding effort^[1].

That gap matters more than it looks. A revenue-neutral formula is arithmetic: nothing new comes in, so every dollar a high-need district gains has to come from a district that loses. A formula funded near $9,450 avoids that fight by adding money instead of moving it. Whether lawmakers land near one end or the other decides whether this reform makes new losers or just makes new winners.

A Bipartisan Complaint, Wrapped Around a Partisan Question

Almost nobody defends the current system on its own terms. Sen. Michael Lee, a New Hanover County Republican, says North Carolina is one of the last states still using this scattered, resource-based approach, and that a weighted formula is what it would take to make school funding transparent and accountable^[10]. Carolina Journal, the news outlet of the free-market John Locke Foundation, has made the same case for years, pointing out that the state spent $16.7 billion on schools in 2022 through a system even school officials struggle to track^[6][7].

The Forum, a Raleigh policy nonprofit that studies public education, spent two years building its case for the same basic switch — convening more than 100 education leaders and finance experts and partnering with the national nonprofit Bellwether^[1][11]. Its own February 2026 study had already found that the funding gap between North Carolina's richest and poorest counties was widening, evidence it treats as proof the current system doesn't make up for differences in local wealth^[5].

So the weights themselves have something close to consensus behind them. What doesn't have consensus is a second question buried in the same 2026 state budget provision that created a work group to study all this. That provision doesn't just ask how to weight the formula. It asks whether the job of actually sending districts their money should move from the Department of Public Instruction to the North Carolina State Education Assistance Authority, or NCSEAA^[10].

The Agency Question Democrats Say Is the Real Story

NCSEAA is not a neutral bookkeeping outfit. It's the state agency that already runs North Carolina's private-school scholarship programs, including the Opportunity Scholarship and Education Student Accounts^[12]. Those are the state's voucher programs, and they've grown toward 100,000 students under Republican legislative majorities^[14].

Sen. Sophia Chitlik, a Durham Democrat, raised a constitutional objection to routing public school money through that same agency. Her concern is that doing so might conflict with the State Board of Education's constitutional authority over public schools^[10]. Put differently: if district money and voucher money start flowing through the same per-student pipes at the same agency, the technical distance between the two shrinks to a policy choice rather than a structural wall.

NC Newsline, a progressive-aligned nonprofit newsroom, led its coverage with exactly this angle, headlining the story as Republicans seeking control over public school funding rather than as a formula overhaul^[4]. That's a real and underreported piece of the provision. But it's also only one half of it — the weights and the disability cap barely appear in that framing, even though they're the part almost everyone, including Democrats, says needs fixing^[3][4].

Locke's own writing supplies the word that connects the dots: portability. Locke's model for weighted funding has listed transparency, fairness, portability and autonomy together since 2019^[6]. Portability means the dollar amount attached to a student could, in principle, follow that student somewhere other than their assigned district. A formula built to fix the disability cap is also, mechanically, a formula that could carry money in directions a district doesn't control. Both things can be true about the same design at once.

Districts Caught Between Two Things They Both Want

Superintendents and school boards want the disability cap gone. They also want predictability, and those two goals don't fully line up. A position-based allotment doesn't disappear the moment 40 students leave a district. A pure per-student dollar amount does, immediately, the day enrollment drops.

Small rural districts feel this hardest. One school bus route costs about the same whether 20 or 40 children ride it. A formula built purely on head counts can leave a district holding fixed costs with a shrinking check to cover them. That's why the timeline built into the state's process — a three-year transition, not an overnight switch — matters as much to districts as the weights themselves^[2].

The February 2026 finding on the richest-poorest county gap cuts both ways here too^[5]. It shows real need in poorer counties. It also shows how much of any district's total funding already comes from local property tax supplements the state formula never touches. A new state formula can narrow the state's share of that gap. It can't touch the local half.

What Changes Now, and What Doesn't Until 2027

None of this takes effect soon. The work group housed at the UNC-based North Carolina Collaboratory has $300,000 in one-time funding and a report due July 15, 2027^[2][10]. That means no formula changes reach classrooms before the 2027 legislative session at the earliest, regardless of which base amount or which agency lawmakers eventually choose^[2].

The political backdrop has also shifted in a way that raises the stakes of this specific process. On April 2, 2026, the state Supreme Court vacated nine years of orders in the long-running Leandro school funding case, ruling that the judges who issued them had lacked the authority to order statewide funding changes^[13]. That removed the court as a lever for forcing more school spending. Whatever happens to North Carolina school funding now happens through the General Assembly's budget, not a judge's order.

Coverage of the report itself has split along familiar lines even where the underlying facts agree. EdNC, a North Carolina education newsroom, framed the release as riding "momentum from lawmakers" — a process unfolding, not a fight underway^[1]. WRAL narrowed its story to the special-education slice alone, the most sympathetic and least contested piece of the debate^[9]. Carolina Journal kept its long-running frame of spending rising while enrollment falls^[8]. None of those framings is factually wrong. Each one is a choice about which of at least four separate decisions — the base amount, the weights, the disability cap, and who cuts the check — a reader walks away thinking is the story.