As they prepare to finish the initial draft of an education finance reform plan, North Dakota school administrators and officials who have been writing the proposal are starting to think about how to sell it.

The state Commission on Education Improvement, which meets Wednesday in Devils Lake, intends to begin circulating the proposal afterward for public comment. Once the blueprint gets its initial public review, the commission will decide whether to recommend further changes.

The plan will include an overhaul of how state aid is allocated among schools, changes in special education payments, and initiatives to aid technical education classes and help finance school building improvements.

School officials will get their first look at the bottom line - the Department of Public Instruction's analysis of what the changes could mean for their state education aid payments.

"That is the main thing, of course," said state Rep. David Monson, R-Osnabrock, a commission member and Edinburg school superintendent. "Everyone wants to see, how much do I make, or how much do I lose … They want to see the numbers."

Lt. Gov. Jack Dalrymple, the panel's chairman, spent hours last week drafting a summary of the proposal, writing in longhand on a legal pad.

"It's like having the term paper deadline coming up," Dalrymple said.

The first group of reviewers will be North Dakota's school superintendents, who are eager to discover the plan's impact on their district's finances.

Commission member Warren Larson, who is Williston's school superintendent, is arranging regional meetings with administrators, which he hopes can be held later this month.

Commission member Martin Schock, who is superintendent of schools at Elgin and New Leipzig in southwestern North Dakota, said school administrators will have many questions about how the plan was assembled, and the reasoning behind its effects on state school aid distributions.

"I suspect they'll want to go over what's in it, and what isn't, and why the choices were made, to fully understand the effects of the formula," Schock said.

Gov. John Hoeven has promised to increase state aid to local schools by $60 million in his budget recommendations to the 2007 Legislature.

When coupled with suggested changes in the state's aid distribution method, the only districts that will receive less aid are those with steep declines in enrollment, Monson believes.

"When you put $60 million into it, you're going to have winners, and you're going to have bigger winners," he said. "If you're going to lose money, it's because you've lost a lot of students."

Hoeven appointed the commission in January as part of a bargain to delay a state district court lawsuit aimed at overturning North Dakota's education finance system.

Larson and Paul Stremick, the former school superintendent at Grafton, were added to the commission because Williston and Grafton were among the districts that brought the lawsuit. Stremick is now superintendent in Dickinson, and his successor at Grafton, Jack Maus, is also part of the commission.

Larson and Stremick said they were pleased by the panel's work.

"I went in a little pessimistic," Stremick said. "But I've been extremely happy and impressed with what's happened so far … It's been a progressive group, and not afraid of change. It has been different from what I expected."

The Legislature, which will have the final say over whether the commission's recommendations take effect, "has been slow to change. I thought the commission would be the same way," Stremick said. "It hasn't been that way at all."

Larson said the commission process has been much more productive than a courtroom battle.

"I believe we've made a lot more progress than we thought we were going to make," Larson said. "There's no doubt about it. This is so much better. We're sitting at a table, trying to figure out how to meet the needs of kids … and we're not mad at each other."