School funding setups differ wildly in the US. There's a mix of local funding, typically from property taxes (which is independent of number of students enroll

School funding setups differ wildly in the US. There's a mix of local funding, typically from property taxes (which is independent of number of students enrolled), state funding from state general revenue, and sometimes federal funding. In some school districts, specific school levies may also be passed as sales or property taxes; these may be time-limited to pay for infrastructure or ongoing. The mix of all of the above varies from state to state and school district to school district. The real estate tax funding takes a percentage of the home values of the residents in a community, not a percentage of the incomes, of course. That said, the percentage is typically not fixed. Furthermore, the state funding formulas differ from state to state and are not time-invariant. They do tend to depend on number of student, but not necessarily kind of student (e.g. students in special education programs may or may not get more funding). Note that "depend" doesn't mean "determined by"; in Massachusetts, for example, state funding per student depends on how much money the school district is putting in from its real estate tax base and on the per-student spending in the district; the formula is somewhat complicated but the upshot is that the richer districts get _more_ per-student state funding. Yes, this is way backwards, and isn't even the most screwed up thing about school funding in this country... In any case, in many school districts the bulk of school funding in fact comes from property taxes on the residents of the school district. That's the whole issue in this case: Ms. Williams-Bolar was not in fact paying property taxes in the district in question.