Montana school districts are relying on local votes more often to fill gaps in state support for K-12 education, but they are facing greater difficulty persuading voters to approve property-tax levies, according to data presented to a state study commission on school funding ahead of the 2027 Legislature.
The levy requests are designed as fixed-term increases in property tax, which districts use to cover operational expenses not fully funded by the state. Under Montana’s K-12 funding formula, the state sets a minimum threshold for General Fund budget growth, and districts generally need voter-approved mill levy requests to move beyond that floor.
In the analysis delivered Thursday to the commission, the Montana School Boards Association reported that passage rates for routine funding requests once exceeded 90%, but have dropped sharply in recent years even as fewer districts have taken their requests to voters. The association’s executive director, Lance Melton, said the decline began during the Great Recession and then accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’re down to a smidgeon here — we’re down to the point of ‘why are people running levies any more?’” Melton said at the commission meeting, describing how voter appetite for levy measures has weakened. He and other education leaders have argued that, with inflation and other factors squeezing school budgets, the funding from voted levies increasingly becomes necessary to support basic services.
The association’s figures show the shift over time in how districts approach levy measures. In 2006, Melton’s data indicates, Montana districts proposed 73 elementary levies and 52 high-school levies, and all but five passed. Last year, districts proposed about half that number of levies, and the association reported that nearly half of the proposals were voted down.
The commission also considered school bonds, which typically fund construction projects rather than ongoing operations. The association’s data on bond measures showed less of a straight-line pattern but still suggested decreased voter enthusiasm over time: it found that 11 of 12 bond measures proposed in 2016 were approved, compared with 9 of 16 proposed in 2025.
The study commission is tasked with developing recommendations for changes to Montana’s school funding system that lawmakers could consider during the 2027 legislative session. As the once-a-decade study process continues, some school advocates have signaled they may be preparing a court challenge arguing that the Legislature is not fulfilling its constitutional obligation to fund a system of “free quality” K-12 schools.