The Iowa Legislature has passed a bill to increase public education funding for next school year.

The House and Senate have agreed on a two percent State Supplemental Aid (SSA) rate for the 2026-27 school year. Governor Kim Reynolds initially proposed two percent, while the Senate came out with 1.75 percent and the House was at 2.25 percent. 

Greene County School District Superintendent Brett Abbotts says two percent is quite low for school districts and is going to cause real concerns, including school districts that could go onto the state’s budget guarantee program, which allows those districts to ask for additional property taxes to cover the funding shortfall, due to the state’s funding formula being mostly driven by student enrollment. 

Abbotts explains another area of concern for him is the constant increase in health insurance costs.

“It’s a benefit that we provide to our staff members and when that is continually rising and there just appears to be no end in sight, in terms of those increases, it is something that has to go into our general fund, per the state funding formula. That is something that you would almost never hear in conversations around.”    

District 24 Senator Jesse Green empathizes with school districts when they are faced with expenses, like insurance, even though about 80 percent of the SSA package goes directly to staff funding. He shares his thoughts on that topic.“I think we need to start having a serious conversation at the state level of how to separate that insurance conversation out and maybe having a state pool for some of these issues. But, I think property – for example – insurance would be a classic thing. Why are we not self-funding this? The problem is one insurance company insures 95 percent of the school districts. They certainly have a monopoly in that category. We can try to create competition all that we want, but it just is not happening. So we need to have a serious conversation that’s outside of SSA about the out of control expenses these schools are incurring.”   

The legislature passed a two percent SSA rate increase last year as well.