School-funding business

If legislators didn’t get the message about school funding last week, they never will. Hundreds of Mainers attended the Education Committee’s hearing on funding and hundreds more rented buses to attend but were stopped by the weather. What they need and deserve is simple: Full funding of the state share and a formula that fairly distributes the money.

First order of business for the committee is to form a single bill out of LD 1607 and LD 1712. Both would return much of the fairness removed from the formula during the last decade, producing a plan that presents the true cost of educating a student while directing money to where it is needed most. Each bill has aspects to recommend it — one would divide the funding of schools into four distinct parts to give lawmakers the ability to direct more money locally. The other ensures that full funding is part of the plan. The committee’s job is to assemble the best aspects of each to create a single bill to support.

Finding an answer to the shortcomings in General Purpose Aid to Education is not something lawmakers can postpone. Testimony last week before the committee had students talking about using the same textbooks their parents used — only this time four of them had to share a single book; school officials talking about roofs they cannot afford to repair; a music teacher talking about serving five schools a week because none could afford a full-time teacher.

From Farmington, a doctor discussed the relationship between a lack of educational opportunity and ill health; from Houlton, a school administrator described the difficulty of finding and keeping good teachers given the low salaries he is forced to offer. One person asked how the state could expect a school to meet Learning Results requirements for music when a lack of funding ended his school’s music program years ago.

Or take the testimony about the town of Madrid, soon to be the former town of Madrid. It has survived blizzards, floods, fire, ice and war, but has been defeated by the lack of school funding. It will deorganize 164 years after it was established and its mill-rate effort for schools will immediately fall from 17 to 5 — incentive provided courtesy of state government.

Second on the Education Committee’s to-do list is to address the concerns of Southern Maine, particularly as the reforms affect the formula’s income factor. The formula computes how much a community will receive based 85 percent on relative property values and 15 percent on income. The latter was added in 1995 to the benefit of property-rich towns, but has had a devastating effect statewide.

Income has no business being in the formula for several reasons. Most importantly, its assumption that a dollar taken for taxes in a high-income town has the same effect as a taxed dollar in a low-income town is simply wrong. Clearly, the greater amount of income one has above a minimum for essentials, the greater percentage one can afford to pay — that’s why income tax is graduated.

Further, the argument from wealthier communities that they pay a higher percentage of income — 5 percent vs. 2 or 3 percent — for education costs is extremely misleading: Those percentages are derived by assuming that the household with the median income lives in the median-priced house. In rural communities with low-prices houses and few housing options, that might be true. But it certainly is not true in places with more expensive houses and less expensive alternatives such as apartments or condominiums — where the median-income household is more likely to live. You know, places like Southern Maine.

The disconnect between income and education goes further, however, because property-rich towns are that way not because everyone has a million-dollar home but largely because of wealth generated by commercial or industrial facilities or by tax dollars generated by recreation. These have nothing to do with levels of personal income. And since it is by property valuation that communities raise money, the formula should not have anything to do with personal income, either.

Maine’s school-funding problem comes down to this: Well-off communities have been cheated by General Purpose Aid to Education because it has not been fully funded; poorer communities have been cheated twice, once by the lack of full funding and again by the distortions to the formula.

The Education Committee can solve both problems this session, even if it takes several years to reach the state’s required share of funding. But time is short and the number of bills competing for money long. The committee needs to act soon and decisively to end the decade of inequality in school funding.