Here's an article by Daniel McKee, the Mayor of Cumberland, RI, on how the bill was conceived and passed (Commissioner Deb Gist played a key role of course):

In 2009, as momentum built for a new education funding policy, a new Commissioner, Deborah Gist, took over at the Department of Education. Almost immediately she indicated that RIDE would not be supporting the bills then under consideration at the General Assembly. For the next year, Commissioner Gist was steadfast in her insistence that funding should follow students to the public schools they attend.

Throughout the fall of 2009, the mayors and their policy advisers were in conversation with RIDE, with Brown University's Dr. Kenneth Wong, and with leaders in the General Assembly as Commissioner Gist developed her proposal. On Nov. 8, the mayors published a strongly worded opinion piece on state funding policy in the Providence Journal.

A strong education funding policy would be based on individual student need, establishing the base level of state support every student requires and providing additional support through an equitable and transparent formula for special needs that require costly additional services.

This measurable amount of funding would follow a child to any Rhode Island public school parents choose. Only in this way can we get taxpayers' dollars where they were intended to go. Only in this way can we avoid the practically comic system under which we now live, where a district can continue to receive tens of millions of dollars for thousands of students who no longer attend its schools.

 

----------------------------

Local mayors, administrators launched new school funding formula

www.valleybreeze.com/Freecol/EDIT-mckee-on-school-funding

Last week we all saw Rhode Island go from worst to first on something very important. With a 60-14 vote in the House of Representatives and a 26-9 vote in the Senate, Rhode Island passed the most forward-thinking education funding policy in the nation, a true money-follows-the-student law that can be the backbone for a new, better public education system in our state. At a time when so many people are struggling, this is cause for hope.