The Board of Education was asked to make a terrible decision last week: Should we take money from 129 schools and give that money to 123 other schools? We were asked to do this knowing full well that every school deserves and could use more money.

The tragedy is that this did not have to occur. The board could have voted to give more money to each and every one of our schools, if the weighted student formula had been implemented correctly.

The concept of a weighted student formula is simple. Identify how much money is available for spending in the classroom. Divide that number by the total number of students in the public school system. Add more dollars if the students have learning disabilities or do not speak English as their native language. Send this money to each school, based on their enrollment figures, and allow teachers and principals to spend it in the ways they know best to improve student success.

But two things went wrong in the process of setting up the weighted student formula.

First, and perhaps more critical, the Department of Education refused to allow money spent by the central bureaucracy to be reallocated down to the schools. We are talking about lots of money — an estimated $488 million. That is nearly a half billion dollars!

Where is this money? It is in funds used to run the Department of Education's state and district operations, including the superintendent's office and the 15 DOE district complexes. It is funds allocated for non-instructional staff training, printing, technical support, custodial services, utilities, inspections and planning, to name a few.

Granted, some of these funds need to remain in the central office. But moving just a fraction of these funds into the classroom would have solved the problem of taking precious dollars away from 129 school campuses. This is one reason Gov. Linda Lingle pushed for a formula that would have required 90 percent of all the DOE dollars to go to the schools.

The second thing that went wrong was the decision to reallocate some of the school funds to the schools but not allow principals and teachers to spend the money the way they need to. These are the so-called "categorical programs."

These programs put money into boxes, such as vocational-technical education, space education, driver education, junior ROTC or parent-community networking centers, and force schools to spend the money only for these items. If schools and principals are given flexibility, they can always continue these programs, but if one school decides it needs to spend a year training teachers or buying more school supplies, then it can do so.

The failure to allow schools to spend money for their most urgent needs, coupled with the failure to allocate a higher percentage of the funds into the classroom, has gotten us to the unfortunate point that both major newspapers correctly criticized the Board of Education for making a mistake on the weighted student formula.

For the record, we want to point out that both of us voted against the recent formula modification. We knew it was the wrong choice.

The good news is that our colleagues on the Board of Education have an opportunity over the coming year to correct the flaws with the current formula. By increasing the amount of money that it put into the weighted student formula and abolishing the categorical boxes that hamstring teachers and principals, the BOE has the opportunity to give schools the money they need and deserve to provide a good education for our children.

The best news for Hawai'i's taxpayers is that this can all be done without increasing the size of the DOE budget.

Darwin L.D. Ching and Paul Vierling are members of the state Board of Education. This commentary represents their views as individuals.