NORTHAMPTON — After a tumultuous budget season for its school district, Northampton city officials are stepping up efforts to try to get more state funding for the district.

A resolution before the City Council on Thursday calls for state to increase aid to the Northampton Public Schools by $3 million annually by changing the formula used for school choice and charter school tuition.

The $3 million figure represents the amount of funding that has been deducted annually from Northampton’s state school aid for school choice and charter schools, according to the resolution. The resolution also states that the district received $8 million in state aid last year via Chapter 70, almost the same amount it received two decades ago.

“Northampton has lost millions of state aid dollars in inequitable Chapter 70 funding,” the resolution states. “This resolution is to ask the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to change the way that school choice tuition is funded, by underwriting the municipal cost of sending tuition for low and moderate-income cities and towns.”

The proposed resolution comes after a school budget season that deeply divided the city, with the budget raised significantly from the previous year but still resulting in numerous job cuts. Strong outbursts of emotion were exhibited during council and school committee meetings, with one school committee meeting seeing a high school student leave the room in tears and another council meeting where audience members were asked to refrain from repeated laughing and hissing.

“This is one of the worst budgets I have seen as a city councilor,” said Ward 6’s Marianne LeBarge, who was one of three sponsors of the resolution and has been on the council since the 1990s. “I wish that we could have done more and I think we’ve done what we can. We need the help here and I think this language will really move things for them up there in Boston.”

The creation of the resolution originated in part from a petition begun by former School Committee member Meg Robbins asking Northampton residents to ask the commonwealth to change the way school choice tuition is funded.

Under the current system, when a student leaves a public school district for a charter school, most of the public funding for that student goes with them. Robbins argues that the costs saved by educating fewer students did not make up for the loss of tuition payments, with much of the language from the petition adapted into the city’s resolution.

“Because students ‘choice out’ from different classrooms, grades and schools across a public school district, the costs to operate the public school district remain relatively unchanged,” the petition states. “Many of the costs associated with running a school district do not ‘scale down’ and are fixed costs including maintenance, utilities, transportation and benefits negotiated in good faith for public employees.”

At Thursday’s council meeting, Robbins said that the higher costs associated with students leaving for charter schools created a “downward spiral” that made school services less effective, causing more students to leave and further burdening the school.

“When we reduce the services that we offer here and they get increased elsewhere it’s just a really a difficult place to think about getting out of without support on the state’s behalf,” Robbins said. “The resolution is there to ask our state legislators to work with this fundamental idea that we’d be reimbursed for the cost of sending children out of district.”

Ward 1 councilor Stan Moulton agreed with Robbins that the current system regarding charter schools needs to change.

“Massachusetts has lost sight of the original purpose for charter schools, to try to experiment and then to report back about best practices,” Moulton said. “We’ve lost that part of the equation, while the other half of the equation is draining money from the public schools.”

The council will hold a vote on the resolution during its next scheduled meeting on Oct. 1.