Sure, the math gets tricky, but here's the bottom line: The education aid plan the House endorsed last week costs millions more than New Hampshire has to spend. So does the current system. And House lawmakers have just over a week to make ends meet.

A handful of senators believe video gambling could help. Gov. John Lynch continues to back a tobacco tax increase as the solution. Some lawmakers want to wedge the plan into the budget, even if it means trimming back elsewhere. Others want to spend less on public schools to keep the rest of the budget intact.

Meanwhile, a second education plan is percolating in the State House. Even its sponsor admits it's a long shot, but says it's worth consideration because it would only spend what the state can afford.

The Rev. David Jones, the Senate chaplain, took another approach when he bowed his head Thursday and led senators in a prayer for financial salvation.

"Hopefully you've had some fund-raising ideas come into your head," he told senators.

Divine intervention aside, each money-raising option has jubilant supporters and fervent opponents. Lynch wants the tobacco tax, but Senate President Tom Eaton and House Speaker Doug Scamman don't. Eaton wants to expand gambling, something Scamman abhors and Lynch has yet to embrace. Plenty of Republicans are willing to keep some kind of statewide property tax, which Lynch spent last year campaigning against. Who will prevail? It's anybody's guess.

"I don't know what we're going to get," said Eaton, who's been watching the education aid package morph its way through the House.

Lawmakers are in this fix because few of them like the state's current school funding plan, which was crafted hastily two years ago. In fact, legislators have retooled the state's education aid plan regularly since a 1997 state Supreme Court ruling ordered them to finance an adequate education for all children.

It will be at least another two weeks before the Senate takes over the budget and, with it, education funding. In that time, the latest plan could be trimmed, expanded, reworked or tossed out altogether. As approved by the House, it would spend $529 million next year, including $44 million in transition grants for communities that would receive less state aid and $30 million in property tax relief for poor residents.

This presents a financial quandary because the state's education trust fund contains much less than that - about $400 million, which is replenished each year with money that comes from taxes on businesses, liquor and other things.

"Anytime you go over that trigger level, you have to figure out where the money is coming from,"said Rep. Norm Majors, chairman of the House Ways and Means committee.

By the end of the current fiscal year, New Hampshire will have spent about $455 million on education grants. In this case, the extra $55 million came from the state's general fund, which pays for everything from prisons to forest rangers. But even the current law will cost more next year, compounding lawmakers' troubles.

Just about everyone in the State House will get a chance to solve the problem the coming weeks. The plan's current keeper is the House Finance Committee, where lawmakers are torn between paying for schools or social services. Republican Rep. Daniel Hughes of New Castle looks at this way: Cut the social services to pay for education and the poorest residents suffer.

"The first responsibility of government it to take care of people who can't take care of themselves,"he said. Some of the money in the plan, he pointed out, has little to do with education, like the transition grants. "I'd rather take that $40 million and give it to children with disabilities."

But others see it like this: Cut education aid to preserve the services and the plan loses support in the House.

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