Rep. Larry Campbell, R-Olathe, chairman of the House K-12 Education Budget Committee, studies details of a proposed new school finance formula that is largely similar to the one lawmakers repealed in 2015.

Topeka ? A new school funding formula that looks much like the one lawmakers repealed two years ago will be the focus of attention for the next two weeks as the Kansas House tries to respond to a recent Kansas Supreme Court ruling that said current levels of school funding are inadequate and unconstitutional.

But while authors of the bill provided an outline Tuesday of how that new formula would work, they offered no details about the one aspect of it at the top of everyone’s mind — how much money they plan to put into a new formula. They said those numbers will be released Wednesday when the bill is formally introduced in the House.

“This is strictly a starting point,” said Rep. Larry Campbell, R-Olathe, who chairs the K-12 Education Budget Committee. “We know we’re going to find flaws in it as we start working it and having hearings. We’re going to find things. Hopefully, though, it’s a beginning point.”

The new bill contains many features that one member of the panel, Rep. Clay Aurand, R-Belleville, has advocated in previous years when he chaired the House Education Committee. In fact, it was Aurand who led part of the briefing Tuesday, explaining the rationale behind some of the technical changes compared to the old formula.

Like the earlier formula that had been in place since the early 1990s, the proposed new plan would provide each district with a base amount of money per-pupil, what would be called “foundation aid” in the new law.

Unlike the old formula, however, the new plan would require that 20 percent of the foundation aid come from local property taxes, a feature that appears to shift more of the total funding responsibility onto local taxpayers instead of the state general fund.

Those taxes would be in addition to the statewide 20-mill property tax levy that currently helps pay the state’s share of the cost of public schools.

It would also count students much in the same way used in the old formula, with additional weightings given for students who are more expensive to educate such as bilingual students, children in poverty and children in densely-populated urban districts with high levels of poverty.

Districts with very low enrollment, and sparsely populated districts with high transportation costs, would also receive additional aid.

However, in calculating each district’s total enrollment, the plan would adjust each district’s current enrollment by looking back at the growth or shrinkage that has occurred over the previous four years and either adding or subtracting the average yearly change to the current numbers.

The proposed new plan also provides for a new version of the old local option budgets, which would be renamed “local enhancement budgets” that could be as much as 5 percent of a district’s foundation funding.

And it would give districts an additional option to raise taxes for a “local activities budget” to fund extracurricular activities.

Capital outlay budgets, bond and interest budgets, and funding for virtual schools would continue as they are under current law.

The plan would also leave in place a controversial “school choice” provision in current law that allows corporations to claim tax credits for contributing to scholarship funds that would enable some low-income students to attend private schools.

But it would limit those scholarships to lower-income students in districts that qualify for high density at-risk aid, and it would require the private schools participating in that program to be accredited by the state and to meet performance benchmarks higher than the statewide average.

Public school advocates said after the briefing that they could not tell whether the new formula would be an improvement until they know how much money supporters of it plan to spend.

“There are a lot of machinations here that are different. This is not a small change to the base state aid formula that we had before,” said Rep. Ed Trimmer, D-Winfield, the ranking Democrat on the committee. “It’s hard for us to know what this really does until we know how much money is going to be put into the base aid formula.”

Campbell said he and others were still “tweaking” the bill before it is formally introduced Wednesday, and he did not want to discuss dollar figures until that happens. But he did say, “It’ll be an increase. Oh, absolutely.”

Officials from the Kansas Association of School Boards and the Kansas National Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, both said they liked some aspects of the bill, but could not offer a reaction to it until they see the funding amounts.

Campbell said the committee will hold a hearing and take testimony on the plan Thursday and Friday, and possibly continuing into Monday. He said the panel will then spend most of next week working on amendments, with the goal of advancing the bill to the full House before lawmakers adjourn the regular session on April 7.

After that, the House and Senate will take a three week break while they await the release of new, updated revenue estimates for the next two fiscal years. They will return May 1 to start the final part of the session when they will finalize the budget, a tax plan and the school funding formula.