In the final hours of the 2023 legislative session, Warren County school districts won big.

After facing some mid-session obstacles, a bill unfreezing attendance data used to calculate state funding for schools got final passage on March 30, the General Assembly’s last day in Frankfort.

The state bases the amount of SEEK (Support Education Excellence in Kentucky) funding it gives local school districts on average daily attendance.

After the pandemic began, the state allowed districts to freeze their attendance numbers at either 2018-19 or 2019-20 levels so that SEEK funding wouldn’t decrease as some schools turned to virtual learning.

The problem was that 26 of Kentucky’s 171 school districts kept growing during the pandemic. Instead of being compensated for additional students and higher daily attendance figures, these districts’ SEEK funding was stuck in the past.

Warren County Public Schools and Bowling Green Independent School District were two of the growth districts, accounting for nearly a third of the state’s total growth.

WCPS’ average daily attendance grew by over 600 students since the pandemic began, WCPS chief financial officer Chris McIntyre told the Daily News in February. BGISD grew by about 3%.

BGISD Superintendent Gary Fields and WCPS Superintendent brought their concerns to Rep. Kevin Jackson, R-Bowling Green, a freshman representative for the 20th district.

“Everybody’s appreciative of what the legislature did last year, but again, you don’t take into consideration sometimes the side effects that a bill will have, and one of the side effects was we weren’t keeping up with the growth districts,” Jackson said.

“They were having to hire teachers, they were having to spend money and they weren’t getting reimbursed for those new students.”

Fields told the Daily News in February that BGISD had added over $360,000 in staff in the 2022-23 school year to account for its growth.

House Bill 553 aims to make up for those growth costs. After its approval by the legislature, it was signed into law by Gov. Andy Beshear on March 5.

In total, HB553 allocated $10.5 million to Kentucky’s growth districts based on updated average daily attendance numbers from the first two months of the 2022-23 school year.

Three million of that went to WCPS and $500,000 was allocated to BGISD.

Fields and Clayton were unavailable for comment, as their school districts are on spring break, but they both tweeted their thanks to local legislators involved in getting HB553 passed.

“They went to the mat for our kids & it’s appreciated,” Fields tweeted.

When the SEEK funding issue was brought to Jackson’s attention by Fields and Clayton in January, he got to work right away.

He said he knocked on doors, met with Rep. Jason Petrie, R-Elkton, the chairman of the House Appropriations & Revenue Committee, and held late night meetings with House Speaker David Osbourne, R-Prospect.

“We thought we had something going, then all of a sudden, it looked like we had some roadblocks that we might not be able to overcome,” Jackson said.

The main issue was timing. In a short session, there is only so much ground legislators can cover, and some legislators preferred to wait until the 2024 session to address the SEEK funding issue, Jackson added.

Others were concerned about opening the budget in a non-budget session, which requires more votes and effort. But they dodged that issue by using part of $56 million in leftover SEEK funds that had been previously allocated for last school year.

Jackson played a critical role in HB553’s passage, Osbourne said in a news release. Having leadership’s attention helped, Jackson said.

“When you have a Republican majority and we have a Republican representative now here in the 20th district, that gives us a little bit of leverage in trying to get something like this done,” he said.

Based on his conversations with local superintendents, Jackson said he thinks the extra SEEK funds could be the difference between teachers getting a raise or not.

“It’s been a tough three or four years with the pandemic and everything that they’ve gone through and if this will help morale, if it will help our teachers and staff do a better job, then that’s great,” he said.

“…We really wanted to go to bat for our superintendents and for our students here. They deserve every penny that we can get to educate our kids.”