Rep. Kelly Murphy, D-Scarborough, represents District 125, which includes part of Scarborough. She is the House chair of the Education and Cultural Affairs Committee.

For far too long, Maine’s Essential Programs and Services (EPS) school funding formula, which determines how much money each public school district receives from the state, hasn’t been working well for the vast majority of our communities.

This session, the Legislature finally made important progress to fix some of the formula’s chronic problems — changes that will benefit Maine students, educators and property taxpayers across the state.

The EPS formula was passed by the Legislature in 2000 and first implemented in 2005. Its goal was to provide the state with a mechanism for establishing a minimum sufficient funding level to ensure all pre-K to 12th grade-level students could meet the Maine Learning Results standards. It also aimed to create a fair, equitable funding split between local communities and the state.

Prior to this session, EPS hadn’t been significantly altered in over 20 years, but a lot has changed over that time. Most notably, property valuations in many communities have skyrocketed — especially since 2020 — creating a big disparity between property valuations and residents’ actual ability to pay.

This has made EPS less effective and more inequitable over time, leaving a lot of communities to pay for more than their reasonable share of public education. Maine now has one of the highest levels of reliance on property tax in the nation for school funding.

Other major changes over the last two decades include declining student enrollment, increasing student needs and educator workforce shortages. The formula has also done a poor job of taking into account special education costs and students from economically disadvantaged households.

Recognizing this, in 2024, the Legislature’s Education and Cultural Affairs Committee asked the Maine Education Policy Research Institute to study the impacts of how the formula distributes state funds among districts across the state. They reported back to the committee last year with their assessment, along with some potential changes that could result in a better EPS formula.

Some of these recommendations were included in LD 2226, a bill developed by the Department of Education and which I presented to the committee in my capacity as chair. Ultimately, the bill passed the Legislature with overwhelming bipartisan support — 122-23 in the House and 28-6 in the Senate — before it was signed by Gov. Janet Mills.

As amended, the bill focuses on fixing two of the formula’s provisions: updating regional cost adjustments and modifying the ability‑to‑contribute calculation. Existing regional adjustment factors are outdated, based on historic salary data and misaligned with the current minimum teacher salary framework. Changing the ability-to-contribute framework will also help ease the burden on communities with rapidly rising property values and flat or fixed household incomes.

With these changes, most communities will experience an increase in funding support from the state. Only 11 districts — including Scarborough, which I represent — will see reductions. To help mitigate the loss of funding, I deliberately worked with stakeholders to delay the phasing in of these changes until 2030, which will lessen the immediate impacts on school budgets and give districts time to adapt while further adjustments are made to the formula. It’s not a perfect solution, but it will do the least amount of harm for districts that will be negatively affected. 

These changes to the EPS formula represent only a handful of policies we passed this year that will support K-12 public education throughout Maine. We also passed bills to provide $8 million in one-time bridge funding for 193 school districts, provide $2 million for the Building Assets, Reducing Risks program to backfill lost federal funds, close gaps in our universal school meals program and phase in an increase in minimum teacher salaries from $40,000 to $50,000.

Together, these measures will go a long way to strengthen K-12 public education in Maine, but the EPS formula changes are some of the most consequential. It’s a critical start to fixing a broken formula that is long overdue — and it will have lasting, positive impacts on our entire state in the years to come.