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Tax you to death? Local school boards have plenty other options

Posted by Kevin Fischer on June 15, 2010

Local school districts are feeling the budget heat. Not immune to the recession, school board and superintendents are waking up to realize the money train has jumped the tracks.

Tough choices have to be made, if you consider rubber-stamping a big tax hike tough. The normal whine here in Franklin and I’m sure in other school districts is that the state that has flooded school districts with aid in the past isn’t quite as generous anymore. So school officials put on their best looks of sorrow and contend they simply have no choice but to come to the taxpayers for help, AGAIN, and, oh yes, did we forget to mention, it’s for the children.

The budget equation this year will probably include a new factor in the mix: actual cuts, a budget tactic school boards have been extremely reluctant to utilize, that is, until now. Here in Franklin, somehow, the school board will manage to put forth a wacky approach that will include big spending (over $800,000 for a highly questionable fiber optics project has already been approved), some cuts, and almost assuredly another tax increase.

The question is, who and or what will be cut? In the city of Milwaukee, over 400 teachers got pink slips. So much for the outgoing superintendent’s assertion that emphasis must be placed in the classroom. His successor has already brought in higher-priced administrative cronies from Philadelphia to maintain MPS’ top-heavy bureaucracy. Do we cut personnel? Administrators? Teachers? Staff? Programs? Services?

What’s a school board to do? Members, like the ones in Franklin will throw up their hands and claim to have few options, other than the well known as the taxpayers.

Steve Prestegard at his Marketplace of Ideas blog found some terrific education counsel from Indiana governor Mitch Daniels. Prestegard referred his readers to a Weekly Standard profile of Governor Daniels, mentioned as a possible GOP presidential candidate in 2012. The Weekly Standard followed Governor Daniels around. School board members, take note:

“A reporter from the local radio station appeared. She pressed him on the education budget cuts too. She told him the local school board had just laid off nine teachers and an administrator.

‘What would you say to those people?’ she asked.

He visibly flinched….

‘I’d say it should have been nine administrators and one teacher. There are 20 things that school board could do before it had to lay off one teacher.’

In fact, the governor’s office has publicized a ‘Citizens’ Checklist’ that people can take to their local school boards to see if school officials have made every possible economy. Citizens in Vincennes need to take that list and get answers, he said. The list is filled with questions. Have the administrators ‘eliminated memberships in professional associations and reduced travel expenses’? Have they ‘sold, leased, or closed underutilized buildings’? Have they ‘outsourced transportation and custodial services’?

‘I want citizens to understand,’ he said. ‘When people start demanding we spend more money, they’re saying, We want to raise your taxes.  And the citizens should say, Okay, tell me. Which one of my taxes do you want to raise?’

While local boards set the schools’ budgets, the responsibility for collecting revenue and allocating it to schools has been consolidated in the state government, at Daniels’s insistence. The main benefit, as Daniels sees it, has less to do with schools than with taxation. In Indiana, as elsewhere, schools have been typically funded by local property taxes, which local officials could raise to match their budgets, by increasing either rates or assessments. Consolidation took that option away from them. Under Daniels, home property taxes have been cut drastically—by one third in most cases—and are now capped at one percent. 

‘Property taxation is the most pernicious taxation there is,’ he said. ‘Where else in life can you just decide how much you want to spend and then just dial up the rates to get enough revenue to pay for it? Elsewhere in life, you figure out how much money you have and fit your budget to that. If you’ve got less to spend, well, you’ve got less to spend’.”

Tough to argue with Daniels whose office provides some great ideas on how to spend education dollars wisely and give relief to beleaguered taxpayers.

Some school board members will claim schools can’t survive without whopping increases.  That is simply not true. Public school districts have been awarded pots of gold for years and have squandered their lavish gifts from taxpayers.

The Citizens' Checklist should be required reading for every school board member and every school taxpayer in America.

HT: Steve Prestegard