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Pagosa Springs Local News
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| Subtract One School? Subtract One Day? Add Five Mills? Part Six |
| Glenn Walsh | 3/12/10 |
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| Back to the News Summaries |
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Read Part One
This part of this overlong series focuses on the chaotic unfairness of the Colorado model for distributing state funding to local school districts. If you are enjoying a quick read before breakfast, you can simply scan the bold text in the following two tables. I don’t know that I will add much that is meaningful to these tables. It is difficult to be cogent about chaos.
Two things jump out at me. First, the success of the local district at teaching a low-income population: more successful than any comparable district in the state. Second, how is it possible that Archuleta County receives $3000 per pupil less from the state each year than the average district in Colorado?
If Archuleta, with household income one-third below the state average and over half its students on the Free and Reduced Lunch program, merely received the state average, district taxpayers would be saved over $4.5 million per year. That’s more than the entire Town budget and half the County general fund budget.
The state funding system is entitled an “Equalization” system. When created 22 years ago, the program attempted, with real success, to provide a fair statewide basic education for students from Antonito to Aspen, while permitting local districts to increase basic spending by 20 percent at their own additional expense.
 Whether Joe the Plumber finds the word “equalization” more palatable or not, the system redistributed money. Any program which attempts to equalize a basic and very expensive service does. There was, and is I believe, a widely held belief that government has an important role in providing a more equitable distribution of K-12 education than it does in overseeing the distribution of snowmobiles and home theatres.
The state program began by applying a uniform 40 mill property tax statewide and “equalizing” the money according to a local district’s ability to finance its school budget. This involved, again, some inequity. Wealthier districts paid more. Some districts paid much more.
Yet, it is very hard to imagine any comprehensive and intelligent statewide program that can be scrupulously fair to Aspen and Antonito.
Two things complicated the original “40 mills to Denver” program. First, the voters approved TABOR and the state legislature incorporated TABOR into the school funding program. School districts were still evaluated for their ability to pay — their “local share” — but that share could be paid by lower and lower tax rates as property values increased.
Yet, TABOR only complicated the formula. It was twenty-two years of politics that perverted the original purpose of the program. Year after year the School Finance Act is rewritten at the state capitol, embedding regional influence and personal legislator’s clout in an ever more complicated set of formulas.
I don’t pretend that I can shed much light on this chaos. I am not a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, where chaos is being parsed.
But let me report, with some statewide and local examples, on the basic unfairness of present funding scheme.
I quoted a New York school board member's advice for improving a school district — “become upper middle-class” — yesterday. That advice certainly holds for Colorado schools when you study the statistical profile of Colorado’s elementary schools.
Elementary school statistics are, I feel, the real touchstone of local economies. Parents of small children are often the most vulnerable employees, financially and emotionally, during an economic downturn. Statewide, about one-third of Colorado school families are enrolled in the welfare lunch program. In Archuleta, that figure exceeds half our families.
The best-rated fifteen elementary schools in Colorado, however, have only 4.8 percent of their students on the subsidized lunch program, less than 10 percent of the Archuleta figures.
The direction of this figure doesn’t surprise, though the magnitude might. But consider the direction and magnitude of this figure:
Those best-rated elementary schools with 4.8 percent of their students on subsidized lunch receive, on average, from the state of Colorado $4218 per student each year. Archuleta schools, with ten times their rate of welfare lunch students, receive only $1614 per student — $2600 dollars per student less than the best-rated and wealthiest districts in the state.
There is a pat rationale for this. Defenders of the current set-up insist that state money is distributed fairly if one considers the total assessed value of real estate in each district. Archuleta, they maintain, has a large and valuable real estate market which can support its schools.
Even if true, this contention is suspicious. First, should a state program which redistributes money to address a critical need, be based on a local district’s ability or willingness to tax? Should a statewide program, controlled by Denver, tax the owner of a $300,000 home in Durango $130 dollars while billing the owner in Archuleta for nearly $500 dollars?
Second, the present funding scheme bears almost no correlation to “assessable values.” Let’s look locally.
Archuleta County is a large county with a bounty of undeveloped and still valuable real estate. For each student in the district, there exists about $250,000 of assessed real estate. However, Bayfield has $335,000 of assessed real estate for each of its students.
So, why does Bayfield receive $4,499 from the state each year from Denver for each student, almost $3000 more than Archuleta?
Durango is a far more prosperous city than Pagosa, with income exceeding state and national averages, and less than one-third the percentage of welfare lunch students. Durango is also supported by assessed real estate values of nearly a half million dollars per student.
Yet, with twice the assessed real estate per student, Durango receives $3624 from Denver per student, $2000 per student more than Archuleta.
Regionally, the state funding scheme ranges from the inexplicable to the absurd when compared to Archuleta’s funding level.
Ouray, with an identical assessment, receives $6474 per student — 400 percent more than Archuleta. Creede, also with an identical assessment, receives even more — $7041.
The absurd? Well, the hard-scrabble mining town of Telluride, with assessed property values of $1,317,585 for each of its students, receives $1715 per student, more than Pagosa Springs.
I guess we are already the “next Telluride.”
The tax burden this state scheme imposes on Archuleta County is crushing. Archuleta property owners are now sending $3.5 million more to Denver each year than they did in 2006.
If Archuleta schools, though teaching a far poorer student body than the state average (and teaching them to scores better than state averages), simply received the average “equalization” money distributed from Denver — $4658 — local taxpayers would see their school taxes cut in half.
Asking local taxpayers — taxed fairly — for more money for local schools is a challenge. Asking voters already paying double their fair share for more money — even for a district which is educating low-income students superbly — is going to be painful.
Which is going to require a lot of shared pain. If excellent education for all our children really is our highest priority.
Coming next, Part Seven: Shared pain. |
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