School funding realities

For those of you who don't read the Shelley Pioneer. I sent this as a letter to the Editor.
It has a lot of the same information as my last post. Maybe just more to the point. I am taking my wife to a lunch meeting with Senator Bair on Tuesday. Thanks, Brian




School funding

There was a recent article  in the papers about the constitutionality of how the state funds schools. A nonprofit called Idaho Center for Fiscal Policy wrote a twenty page report about this. I don't quite live in the Shelley school district, but most of my farm ground is in Shelley, so I do have an interest. This article points out the difference between rich school districts like Blaine County and the poorer districts like Firth and Shelley. There are 115 school districts in Idaho. In the state rankings based on taxable value per student.  Blaine County is ranked 3rd with a dollar value per student of about $4,000,000. Firth is ranked 100th at $227,000 and Shelley is 109th at $191,000. The state constitution states "that the state, not the local districts, are to provide a uniform and thorough system of public and free schools". Because the state support for school funding has dropped so much it is forcing most schools to have levies to maintain a basic level of funding.  It has a lot of information, but the main point is, because of the real need to have levies, the poorer districts have to tax at a higher rate than the wealthy districts and because of this it is unconstitutional. 

The article quotes the Chairman of the Senate Education Committee. He doesn't think this is a problem. One thing he is quoted as saying is, "The current system gives communities the chance to approve property tax levies if they want to spend more than the state supplies". He also says, "just throwing money at the public schools does not result in better education".  I find this statement offensive. Districts aren't just throwing hard earned taxpayer's  money at schools to fund the deficit brought on us by the state, the state is forcing districts to have levies. 

I wish Tom Luna would have the courage to say something like--"It's our fault because of the economy we had to reduce school funding to the point that we now expect the local districts to raise property taxes to fund local levies to support their own funding adequate for their local school districts". But he would never say anything like this, he would rather give the impression in the media that they have funded schools okay, and if there is a deficit in funds it's somehow the local districts fault. 

Thank you, Brian Esplin Firth school board member and Shelley property taxpayer.