Mississippi Today Ideas is a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share their ideas about our state’s past, present and future. Opinions expressed in guest essays are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of Mississippi Today. You can read more about the section here.   

Mississippi lawmakers are talking about redistricting again, but this time it’s not legislative districts that are at issue. Both chambers of the Legislature have proposed or are studying potential changes to the state’s school district map through consolidation.

A select committee of the House is looking at the issue. A bill, sponsored by Sen. Education Chair Dennis DeBar during the 2026 session, proposed obtaining information on district size, population, administrative costs and the potential pros and cons of consolidating existing districts.

These are important questions, but they are not the only ones that policymakers should be asking. School system redistricting can achieve much more than efficiency, as New America shows in a recent report, Redrawing the Lines, that features Mississippi. The right boundaries can also be the key to achieving funding fairness and helping Mississippi make good on the promises of its new school funding system.

The Mississippi Student Funding Formula, which passed in 2024 and is in its second year of implementation, is a major achievement. It represents a $200 million increase in support for public schools, and importantly, this investment is targeted to supporting the students and communities that need the most help.

The new formula recognizes the needs of students from low-income backgrounds with a per-pupil funding boost of 30%, up from a paltry 5% under the old system. It also systematically supports English learners for the first time, with a 15% funding bump, where before, Mississippi was one of only two states without specific funding for these students.

And the formula now meaningfully addresses community-level cost-drivers, including sparsity and concentrated poverty.

These are big wins on both the size of Mississippi’s school funding pie and the method for dividing it. The formula strongly signals the state’s priorities of ensuring that kids with all kinds of needs have access to a quality public education.

But ill-placed school district borders will undermine these goals. Conversely, the right district map can make sure that the state is able to make good on the formula’s promises.

How so?

A school district boundary outlines the school system: the neighborhoods from which local kids can go to district schools. But it also defines the area whose property taxes will support those schools. This makes the district boundary a powerful and underused tool of school funding policy.

If Mississippi lawmakers intentionally draw school district boundaries to encompass more neighborhoods with more equal property values, they can ensure that kids in every community receive a fairly funded education.

As an example, take the Yazoo City Municipal School District, which is surrounded on all sides by the Yazoo County School District. The child poverty rate in Yazoo City is a very high 57%. In Yazoo County, 37% of children live in poverty.

Despite the city district’s higher-need population, it has less money to spend. Between state and local dollars, Yazoo City had just over $11,700 per pupil last year, while Yazoo County had more than $15,300. Why the disparity, in the first year of a new funding system meant to give higher-need districts more funds?

It’s not because the new formula isn’t working. It’s because Yazoo County has more local dollars. The formula does indeed allot Yazoo City more state funding, about $8,790 per pupil to Yazoo County’s $6,490. But then come the property tax revenues.

The two districts have nearly identical tax rates at 51.25 and 51.3 mills, respectively, so the city residents are trying just as hard to support public schools. But Yazoo County has the advantage of much higher property values – an especially big advantage given Mississippi’s “27% rule,” which favors wealthy districts with a cap on the amount of local dollars that can be counted against a district’s state education aid.

Once local property tax dollars come in, the county is able to raise far more money per pupil, swamping the state’s efforts at matching funding to student needs. Even with the new formula, Yazoo City students wind up on the losing end, yet again.

It would be astronomically costly to cover the gap with more state funds. But what if Yazoo County School District’s local dollars weren’t fenced off by an ill-placed school district border? What if every kid attending schools within county limits – even those living within Yazoo City itself – got a fair share of its property tax revenues? And what if all schoolkids throughout Mississippi had access to their fair share of the state’s property wealth?

Our New America report shows that if Mississippi adopted a fully county-based school district map – no multi-district counties or carve-outs like the one for Yazoo City – the state would reduce these ground-level inequalities in per-student property wealth by 18.5%.

If lawmakers mandated a more extensive set of consolidations, chosen not only for their efficiency but also for their fairness, Mississippi’s school districts could reduce ground-level tax-base inequality by 57.5%.

We also model an alternative map, drawn from scratch to maximize gains instead of starting from current boundaries, that could improve tax-base equality between districts by an astonishing 81.6%. With the right district lines, it is absolutely possible to give Mississippi kids their fair share of local funding.

Mississippi has invested so much in its kids’ education, but too much of that investment is falling through the cracks between unequal school districts. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Through school system redistricting, the state can make good on the Mississippi Student Funding Formula promise of getting the most education dollars to the kids and communities that are most in need of support.

The Legislature is already talking about it. Let’s make sure they’re having the right kind of redistricting conversation, one that considers not just efficiency, but also ensuring that the state’s school funding system can meet the needs of kids and communities.

Zahava Stadler is project director of the Education Funding Equity initiative at New America. Her work focuses on the policies that govern how school funding is raised and distributed, and how those policies affect the equity of the public education system. Before joining New America, Stadler worked on state school funding policy at The Education Trust. Previously, Stadler served as director of policy at EdBuild, which advised Mississippi lawmakers on an earlier attempt to revise the school funding system.