Budget Update and Public Education Information
by Darrel Stufflebeam
July 24, 2010
Budget Update and Public Education Information
The school board recently met for its annual goal-setting session and made a decision regarding New Facility Funding (NFF). As you may recall from previous articles, NFF allows us to count each student in the new SGES as an additional one-quarter student for two years if our Local Option Budget (LOB) is at least 25% of our General Fund.
Considering that the average LOB is 30%, the fact that we’ve been ineligible for NFF shows how comparatively low our local school taxes are. Last year, we would’ve had to raise our LOB about 11 mills to be eligible for NFF. The BOE didn’t want to do that. This year (our final year of eligibility) we only need to raise our LOB 3.4 mills to be eligible.
A mill increase of 3.4 mills is still a significant tax increase so, to compensate, we are going to lower our mill levy for our bonds by two mills. That way, our total mill increase will be only about 1.4 mills, which would add about $16 per year to tax bill on a $100,000 home. We’re able to do that largely because overall property values have increased. We will likely have to raise the mill levy for our bonds next year but, hopefully, we can lower the LOB to make up for it.
Overall, we are gaining about $526,000 in additional state funding at a local cost of about $210,000. That’s a 250% return on our local investment. The money will be used to catch up on capital items like purchasing buses, classroom technology, and small facility improvement projects.
In other news, I recently presented important information about Kansas Public Schools to our school board. You can view the PowerPoint and all of the details by visiting our website at www.rockcreekschools.org or emailing me at stuffled@rockcreekschools.org. Here are the highlights:
- The state constitution requires public education to be “suitably” funded and locally operated.
- The state lost a state Supreme Court school funding case in 2006 because their own studies consistently showed that, considering the huge new and expensive mandates placed upon it over the past few decades, public education was grossly underfunded. Funding has been drastically cut since then due to the recession.
- Most increases in school funding have been for targeted groups like at-risk or disabled students or for bond projects in some school districts.
- Operating funds for schools have barely kept up with inflation over the past ten years and then only because of increases in Local Option Budgets.
- Nearly all school funds are spent directly on classroom costs or things that directly support the classroom.
- Kansas School districts are very diverse in regard to wealth and size.
- Education is the key to lifetime earnings.
- School districts must keep prudent cash reserves in order to pay their bills on time and prepare for expected or unexpected costs.
- Kansas is among the top ten states in the nation in regard to student achievement but is one of the lowest cost-per-pupil states.
