The state of Idaho annually funds public K-12 education through several different methods; the method with the most dollars involved and consequentially, the biggest impact on a school district is the "Foundation Program." The terminology we use is specific to our state's Foundation Program and easily leads to confusion.

The Foundation Program uses average daily student attendance (ADA) as its basic building block. Daily student attendance is measured by name, classroom, grade, school and district. Each district reports attendance data monthly to the State Department of Education using a program called ISEE - Idaho System for Educational Excellence. This system measures a single student's attendance in classes every day of the school year. In their reporting each district differentiates the students between general education students, exceptional needs students, alternative school students and juvenile detention center students if a district provides education services to eligible youth housed in juvenile jail.

Whew! The state's finance department then calculates how many student "units" that attendance represents based on certain parameters. The different parameters are kindergarten, elementary 1-3, elementary 4-6, secondary 7-12, exceptional needs preschool, exceptional needs elementary, and exceptional needs secondary, the juvenile detention center and finally, the alternative high school. Each of these parameters has a different unit divisor to calculate "Support Units."

A Support Unit is the initial building block of the Foundation Program. It drives our major source of revenue. It is used to apportion special one-time funding; it is the single most important building block of a district's state Foundation Program dollars. To regard it as less than that is to ignore its impact across a district every day.

Among the Governor's Task Force recommendations on education reform is No. 13 - "Investigate an Enrollment Model of Funding Schools." As a school district trustee in Billings, Mont., many years ago, I used this method of funding and it continues to be used in Montana today. The term was ANB - Average Number Belonging; other acronyms are used in other states.

There was a reason we used ANB as the basic building block of the foundation program: it smoothed out the dollar volatility of an attendance model. There are several reporting periods in either model, but in the attendance model, a week of poor attendance, say for a flu outbreak, can severely impact your foundation dollars. ADA funding also plays havoc during our mandated testing days around PSAT and SAT, mostly in the high schools, when the entire school day is turned upside-down focusing on testing one or two specific grade levels while students in other grades view it as a "free day" to be absent from school. We are also challenged with immunization reporting and potential exclusion of students from school with the district being penalized financially as we work with families to come into compliance. The attendance model is the reason some call me a "Doomsday Budgeter." Here's why:

Our district is currently developing its FY 15 budget for our School Board and community input. We can only project enrollment for next school year and we'll build our anticipated Foundation revenue dollars and our expenditures from this projected enrollment. Interestingly enough, we can get pretty precise with that projection. But our available revenue for all operations will be no higher than 95 percent of what we can project. The single biggest reason for that is receiving revenue based upon attendance.

As the district's chief budgeter, I dare not take us further than that. I'm placed in the position of projecting next year's attendance as my budget building block. Will we have lower attendance for any reason at any level? Well, the district's financial history teaches me that the 95 percent number is a safe number to account for that uncertainty. By using 95 percent for FY 14 I did another "Doomsday Budget" by not allocating perhaps an additional $111,000 that may be available as revenue. I use the word "appears" because until after the May 15 reporting cycle and the July 15 final state Foundation payments, the district won't know our final revenue amount. If attendance falls during the year, districts have to pay dollars back to the state; District 271 hasn't had to do that because we budget conservatively.

Essentially, the district must use enrollment as our budgeting tool but we're receiving state Foundation payments based on attendance. These are two different models trying to be blended for a single budget. The results are exciting.

You may be asking: Doesn't enrollment "move around" through the year? Yes it does, but it moves very slowly and in a very tight range. For example, for SD 271 it looks this school year the movement seems to be in a range of 50 to 100 students ... up and down. And our attendance? Absences ranged from 575 to nearly 800 students absent - per day - in the second week of February. If we were budgeting on ANB, we could safely budget 3 percent higher to the schools than we did this year. The difference and opportunities are enormous. Which is why, if our Legislature sees fit, we have volunteered to be a school district that "pilots" the enrollment model for FY 15. If they are looking for a laboratory in which to try it, District 271 would be a great place.

Wendell Wardell is Coeur d'Alene School District's chief operating officer.