‘That’s not new.’ Task force ideas for Ky school funding have been around for 20 years.
Kudos to Rep. James Tipton, R-Taylorsville, and Sen. Max Wise, R-Campbellsville, for taking a sincere interest in Kentucky’s school funding problems, and putting out some good ideas about what to do next.
Of course, they could have saved us all a lot of time because those ideas have been around for 20 years, and are sadly familiar to anyone who pays any attention to the state’s public education system.
Superintendents have begged the General Assembly for years for the state to fully fund full-day kindergarten. They’ve implored lawmakers not to pass unfunded mandates like the 2019 school safety bill, have pleaded for a return to full funding for transportation and more money to reopen the family resource centers that helped students overcome poverty to do well in school.
But what everyone, including Wise and Tipton, knows perfectly well is that Kentucky’s public education system is underfunded by at least one billion dollars, probably more, and unless lawmakers put more money into base funding, they’re just moving money around to different pots. Wise called it a Christmas list of wishes for our schools, but in this case, it’s a list that the Grinch tears up every session.
“We are appreciative that those things were shared in the report and we certainly support that, but that’s not new information,” said Tom Shelton, former Fayette superintendent and current secretary of the Council for Better Education, which commissioned the report on Kentucky’s inadequate funding in 2014.
Take transportation. It’s supposed to be reimbursed fully every year, based on costs from the year before. Some time long ago, no one seems to remember, the state stopped sending districts the full amount. Now it’s about 55 percent paid by the state and 45 percent paid by local districts out of local property taxes. In Daviess County, that’s been roughly $3 million per year over the past 10 years, $30 million that could have been used for instruction, but wasn’t. In Fayette, Shelton estimated, it’s probably as much as $10 million annually.
“You could put more money into the base, but you could offset it by not fully funding transportation,” Shelton explained. “It was a shell game. You were cutting below the line and nobody knew it.”
And that’s what will continue to happen unless lawmakers put more money into the base. Each time you separately add more money to a program like family resource centers, you take money away from some other part of the state allocation formula known as SEEK. That effect, over many years, has started to erode what made the Kentucky Education Reform Act so revolutionary in 1990 — equity between rich and poor districts because the formula did not depend solely on one district’s property taxes, but put them all into one pool.
“Unless you add more money to the base, it creates winners and losers,” Shelton said, “and that’s not the way we improve education for all Ky kids.”
So when folks from the Bluegrass Institute talk about how the state provides $4,000 per student, that’s not true, said Matt Robbins, superintendent of Daviess County and president of the Council for Better Education.
“Our number is about $1,800, the rest is a local tax burden,” he said.
Another task force recommendation was to change state funding from being based on Average Daily Attendance to “membership,” but that could also create winners and losers because schools that have better overall attendance would get less money.
State school funding is extremely complicated, and probably all Education Committee members should get briefings before every budget session, like the one approaching. The bill will only go up. Another recommendation from the task force is for the Office of Education Accountability to research the cost of an “adequate” public education in Kentucky, as guaranteed by the Constitution, with a particular emphasis on special needs students. They also ordered the LRC to review school funding issues in the 2022 interim.
In a subsequent conversation, Wise said the General Assembly probably needs to take another look at tax reform. Republican ideas on this differ from mine; in 2018, they cut all income tax to 5 percent, including the wealthy, and added some service taxes, but not enough of them.
This stuff is definitely not as entertaining as “man pageants” in Hazard or screaming about critical race theory and which books to burn. But it’s probably the most important thing that lawmakers do— or should do — every year, and they need more urging from parents and the public to do it right.
We spend too much money putting too many people in prison and not enough on our children. We all know this, that education is the surest way to pull Kentucky out of its historical patterns of poverty. Wise and Tipton cracked the door, it’s time for all of us to make sure it’s fully opened.
This story was originally published November 11, 2021 at 9:44 AM.
