Sec. 19. Early retirement program. Concurrent with their review of the feasibility of establishing recruitment and retention incentives for educational personnel pursuant to Public Law 2001, chapter 660, section 6, the State Board of Education and the Department of Education shall prepare an analysis of the alternatives available for establishing an early retirement program for educational personnel.

Emergency clause. In view of the emergency cited in the preamble, this Act takes effect when approved, except as otherwise indicated.

SUMMARY

This bill provides amendments to the school funding formula to ensure student equity and taxpayer equity in the distribution of state resources for kindergarten to grade 12 public education in the State. In order to achieve these goals, the bill provides the following changes to the school funding formula.

1. Beginning in fiscal year 2003-04, the pupil counts and the property valuation data used for determination of the state subsidy to be distributed to each school administrative unit will be based on the averages of the annual numbers for pupil count and for property valuation for the most recent 4- year period.

2. As an exception to the current method of computing property fiscal capacity, the Commissioner of Education shall provide municipalities that have tax-exempt property that exceeds 20% of property in the municipality due to the location of nonprofit and governmental organizations within the municipality, with an adjustment to the property weight used to determine their school funding subsidy.

3. In fiscal year 2003-04, the income factor used to determine local fiscal capacity will be calculated at 20% and in fiscal year 2004-05, the income factor used will be calculated at 25%.