School funding is going to be a hot topic this legislative session. An organization called Our Schools Now is
promoting a 7/8 of a one percent income tax increase to increase funding. So, let’s look at the numbers for a
second. The current income tax rate is
5%, so if the increase goes through, that would take it to a rate of
5.875%. If you make $50,000, that would
mean an increase of $437.50. If you make
$100,000, you would see an increase of $875. The projection is that this would raise $750
million for schools. We all know that
Utah is dead last in school funding as far as funding per student (we rank #1
in the percentage of our budget set aside for education, we just have a lot of
kids which explains the discrepancy in those 2 rankings). So more school funding is the answer,
right? Maybe. But let’s look at some other numbers.
100% of income tax is supposed to go to our schools. It used to be that all of that money went to
K-12. But then we started expanding that
and now post-high school institutions get a chunk as well. How much?
To the tune of about $800 million a year. If we actually put our income taxes into
K-12, we wouldn’t need the new 7/8 of one percent increase.
But surely that is the only place where education funding is
being siphoned off. Nope. Our educator pensions are also pulling money
away from our kids. Because the amount
of what we owe (and promised) our retired teachers in the form of wages, health
premiums, and retirement benefits is actually drastically in the hole from what
we actually have, we are pulling money from our schools to fund these unfunded
liabilities. How much? In Alpine, it costs almost $23 million a year
to pay for these unfunded liabilities. What
if those pensions had been appropriately funded?
Reduce education expenses by 3.7%,
·
Increase the Weighted Pupil Unit (WPU) by almost 7.5%
·
Increase teacher pay by 14%
·
Raise public education employee wages by approximately 8.5%,
·
Double the number of teacher aides and paraprofessionals inside classrooms
or
·
Operate an additional 40 elementary schools or several hundred new classrooms.
You can read the report here in black and white. http://financialreports.utah.gov/saoreports/2016/AR16-03EducationPensionCostsEducation,Officeof.pdf
One of the bright and shiny ideas of Our Schools Now is to
have the tax increase go directly to schools.
You can go to the website and see how much the tax increase would impact
the schools in your area. (ourschoolsnow.com)
One of the things that frustrates me about initiatives like
this is the rhetoric that accompanies it.
I have already seen the propaganda-add your name to our website so that
everyone knows that you support public education! I support public education. In addition to my local property taxes and
our income tax, I clip box tops and buy school t-shirts and pay for entries to
school 5Ks and give classroom donations and purchase silent auction items and
recycle newspapers at school recycle bins and purchase items at the book
fair. I choose to support my schools
with my money for those things. It is
not mandated, it isn’t money taken out of my paycheck, it is what I choose to
add to school coffers. But when I see a
tax increase, I think of my friend who is a single mom who has 5 kids and is a
teacher. How does a tax increase impact
her?
And not all of the money from the 7/8 tax increase goes to
K-12. 84% of it does, but 15% goes to
higher ed and the remaining 1% goes to applied technology colleges. But the schools would just get a check,
right? No, because accountability. Schools are required to set goals, meet them,
and then they get the money. Because
there must always be hoops. If we need
to appropriately fund schools, then let’s fund them appropriately. But I am done with the hoop-jumping.
One of the arguments that has been made is that if you want
to increase school funding, you can make a tax-deductible donation to your
local school through the Alpine Foundation.
If you think schools need more funding, no one is stopping you
from writing a check.
And then there is the little thing called impact fees. The legislature (which is filled with
individuals who profit from real estate and are lobbied heavily by the real
estate lobby) decided to make it illegal for impact fees to be collected for
schools. So when developers come in and
build new neighborhoods, they can be charged for the “impact” those new homes
with have on services and infrastructure like sewer, water, roads, and parks,
but impact fees for the building of new schools is forbidden. If we were able to collect impact fees, the
delay and cost of building new schools to deal with our high growth areas would
have been offset. How long are we waiting
for schools to be built in our high growth areas because developers are not
paying their fair share for the increased population? If we were able to collect impact fees, we
would not have such overcrowded schools and our class sizes would not be so
large. This is just an example of another
way in which funding for our schools is being diverted.
I am still undecided about the tax increase, but I am
hesitant that a tax increase would solve our school funding problems. I would like to see the legislature take back
our $800 million from post-secondary institutions and appropriately fund
teacher pensions. I would also like to
see the legislature allow impact fees for our local schools. If we aren’t using money set aside for our
schools now, why do we think more money will be used in a different way?
