The impact of the property tax debacle is drifting to ever more local levels. The history is long and cumbersome, and I’ve documented no small part of it here. But, now it’s starting to look like it’s going to mess with my kid’s education, so I’m starting to take it a little personally. Today, as reported by Meranda Watling in the Lafayette Journal & Courier, our school corporation announced a reduction in force of about 20%.
Several of those teachers — the youngest and the ones in specialty areas, including elementary art, music and physical education — will soon receive “reduction in force” letters stating that their jobs may no longer exist in TSC this fall. Those 150 teachers represent 20.5 percent of all TSC teaching staff.
That was the unanimous decision of the TSC school board. The vote came after the board tabled the decision earlier this month and then listened Monday to more than 90 minutes of discussion and questions, both from the audience and from board members.
The reduction is expected to help TSC close a $7.8 million budget gap in its general fund this year.
. . .
Heather Brooks, co-president of the teachers union, said after the meeting that she continues to be disappointed by the lack of openness on the part of TSC’s administration. It wasn’t until last week, she said, that TSC administrators formally asked for negotiations with the teachers. And it wasn’t until the board meeting Monday that she heard any dollar figures put to the teachers union’s alternative budget cut proposals.
I suspect we can look for the usual suspects to deflect criticism about school programs crumbling in the wake of questionable tax policy decisions with some version of “teacher’s unions are to blame.” It’s an evergreen, all purpose, floor wax/dessert topping issue.
For my kids, it means bigger class sizes, less preparation time for the teachers with the bigger classes, and less instruction in “non-core” subjects like art and music (but what role have art & music played in human civilization, really?) Which is too bad, because Cole has really been showing an aptitude for such things.
Update Specifics having to do with the proposed cuts are here (pdf).
The school board is elected to work for the tax payers,and that means managing taxpayers money. .That means cut the budget in accordance with what is available,and everyone has to make due with what’s left. This is the mindset of fiscally conservative voters,especially since most who pay school tax dont have kids in school. And the most expendable subjects are the so-called ‘electives’ such as art and music and foreign language. The fact that many may have a grudge against public education is an added incentive to cut.
So cut the budget across the board and those who teach are expected to deal with that,and they do,but that’s not to say achievement doesn’t suffer,but achievement is hard to measure beyond one’s own children in school,and any conservative will immediately point out that more money doesnt improve educational achievement,which of course is true in a general sense.
I remember recently , Mike Pence, rep.from Indiana, asking President Obama in public forum if he would approve of across the board tax cuts,so it’s a general mindset of conservatives that politicians make these across-the-board tax cuts and others are left to figure how to cut programs and fire personnel to make due with what is left. In other words, it’s a belief that tax cuts are always positive and specificying programs isnt required.
The largest expenditure by far for schools is staff,but so many people assume all that has to be done is ‘cut waste’ and fire a few administrators. But that’s not the way firings are prioritized.
I don’t have a solution of my own,but Im just trying to verbalize how Ive found the public educational seems to generally work.
91.64%(about 85% of that goes to in-classroom instructors, either teachers or assistants) of my school’s general fund goes to Salary and Benefits either in the form of direct payments to employees or payments to vocational and special education cooperatives. 5.21% goes to utilities.
Due to the state cuts revenue is down $400,000. Can someone explain how I am cutting that amount of money from expenditures without getting in to staff?
You won’t find me blaming the teacher’s union. I’ll blame the State of Indiana. My home district, Hamilton Southeastern, is suing the state over revenue issues.
The main problem here seems to be that the state takes in the property tax revenue, and then returns far less of it to the district from whence it came. I’d like to see the state taken out of the equation entirely. Let the money never leave the districts. In the case of my property tax bite, 70% is supposed to go to the schools. I know that’s a much higher proportion than most counties. It is in large part to offset what is shuffled elsewhere and skimmed. Then, to make up the difference, Fishers passed a local issue to raise additional taxes for the schools. The school board campaign was built on the threat of laying off teachers.
This all happened while an addition was made to Fishers High School. Endless money for buildings, apparently.
Actually Mike– the insanity is that schools might have huge capital projects funds while the general fund is cash poor. But if they would allow flexible / local decisions about the money in which funds.. then the majority of schools would be weathering this storm without the disruptive chaos Doug is describing. But surely Indy knows better how to spend money in Delphi and Lafayette. The craziest part of the TSC debacle is that they’ll have to complete construction on a new building needed for the number of students they have– without the staff to staff it.. so it will sit empty.
The Governor and his lapdog Tony Bennett seem hell-bent to destroy public education and teachers unions. This will be their key as they promote Charters and corporate takeovers. And in the end the state will still have to provide for education.. of the lowest social and educational individuals.
GREAT, right?
We warned mitch and the other gopers that moving to an all state funded school formula based on sales and income taxes, not property taxes, would lead to this result. It did in Michigan and other states where it has been tried. Same result–economy goes south (not because of the tax change), funding dries up, cuts are made.
Too bad the candidate for state superinendent of Public Instruction from your area saw fit to travel abroad instead of campaigning last year. mitch and tony are one in the same joined by the strings of the puppeteer. And now that mitch has placed his campaign managers wife at the helm of the higher ed commission, the command structure is nearly in place. mitch has planned all along to take over the public system, privatize it where possible, let the rest rot, and dictate to colleges and universities what can be taught and how.
Anyway, we take from the rich and spread it around to the poor to equalize the funding each school corporation receives based on the number and type of students. Otherwise, we would have a situation like Chicago and the surrounding suburbs, the rich enclaves have tons of money to spend and build, the inner city students are left without much at all. Our property tax based system of funding building did not alleviate this entirely, many of our small rural corporations are having to do with outdated facilities(of course, many of the private, church run schools meet in facilities that cannot pass health and safety inspections–like fire safety).
Anyway, sorry to have this happen to your district. My two boys went there, and while the people at McCutcheon always seemed to be fixated on sports, what with the two gyms, the pool and the outdoor complex, they did provide a good opportunity for those into music and arts and high end learning for college.
Well, the sorry events happening in Mike’s district are these: it’s in the wealthiest county in the state; it is 81% white, and enrolls half as many African-American and slightly more than one-third the Hispanic students of the average Indiana school district. 3% of its students live in poverty. It provides Special Education programs at 85% of the state average, and has 95% of the English language learners of the average district, mostly due to an Asian population 250% above Indiana average.
It likes to call itself, on letterheads and in public lawsuits, the Fastest Growing School District in Indiana, mostly due to a development plan which brings new meaning to the term “unfettered”.
I can drive to Fishers in eight minutes. Used to be five.
I can drive in the opposite direction two minutes and I’m in the IPS district, which, along with Center Township, is pretty much the only functioning governmental entity left of the old city of Indianapolis, before it annexed everything to the Marion county line in the 60s to assure continued Republican dominance. It also, full disclosure, is where my wife teaches.
Two and one-quarter as many students. 30% live below the poverty line (ten times HSE). 58% are African-American and 14% Hispanic. 80% get free or reduced-price lunches. Almost 20% receive Special Education–three times as many as HSE–and over 10% are English learners, meaning that despite the large Asian population, IPS educates 25% more English learners than HSE, and 60% more special needs children.
And of course that’s before we get into available educational opportunities, college-aptitude or vocational programs, or start counting pools. So who wants to volunteer to explain to an IPS student, born into poverty, that the education money that’s his one possible lifeline is going to the rich folks fifteen minutes away, because there’s a magical formula hidden in 19th century Indiana plating practices?
(By the way, as I understand the simple-minded explanation put forward by Dr. Brian Smith, HSE schools are suing the state over the education funding formula which currently provides them with 11% more per capita than the Indiana average. So I sorta suspect something’s being left out.)
Actually, the state doesn’t handle any of the property tax revenue. You pay that to your county and it is allocated back to your attendance area.
The state does handle all of the sales tax and income tax money and they allocate that back to governmental units. That is what funds the School General Fund and that is what the lawsuit is about. The schools in the suit disagree with the formula used to distribute the pot of money earmarked for School General Fund.
None of your local property tax goes to the General Fund unless you pass a local referendum for that purpose. HSE did that, but STILL the local property tax that you pay will be collected by the county and allocated to your attendance area. None of that property tax money will go to the state for allocation.
“HSE schools are suing the state over the education funding formula which currently provides them with 11% more per capita than the Indiana average.”
I understand what you are saying about student population characteristics and those should be addressed through a properly formulated complexity index, but I don’t understand your calculation on a per capita basis, we are talking about $s/student.
According to the DOE in 2009 State Support(all money paid by the state to a school):
State Average per student: $6580.93
HSE: $5,710.68
IPS: $8,545.80
This sort of debate always seems to come back around to folks in wealthy communities doing everything possible to avoid subsidizing schools in lower income communities. So many of the people in those wealthy communities would be the first to tell you how nice and hard-working and probably how Christian they are. Their (typically non-denominational, ahem) churches sure are pretty. But don’t ask them to part with a nickel to let a kid from across the tracks have a fair shot at the goal.
@Akla: I believe that Mitch Daniels intended this result, so while I applaud you for warning him, he wasn’t going to listen anyway. The man does not believe in public anything, unless it is his friends and cronies getting overpaid for gov’t jobs for which they have few qualifications, or using public funds to help out certain industries that he favors.
Paddy, I used the 2007 figures from the Federal Education Budget Project (“non-partisan”, as they say). I didn’t look for figures under the new funding formula on the grounds that they’d be estimates.
What with all the switching back and forth and reading lines on charts, by the time it came to aim another well-deserved kick at Dr. Smith my eyes had glazed over, and the different formula was glossed over. My apologies; let’s just note that HSE found no legal fault when the formula favored its coffers, and that the practice is old enough that it was Martin Luther who noted much depended on whose ox got gored.
Wouldn’t it be great for school parents to picket Daniels’ mansion
which is near Ditch Road 24×7. These cuts are happening in many school systems statewide, regardless of whether urban or suburban. Of course,
the “tea potty” crowd thinks the cuts aren’t enough because they legally want to pay no property taxes and want to go to a 14% sales tax rate.
When exactly did it favor HSE?
Again from the DOE
2008 State Average per student: $4,036.61
HSE: $2,279.14
IPS: $5,912.94
2007 State Average per student: $3,967.97
HSE: $3,338.64
IPS: $5,291.33
If we go farther back, we get in to formulas that had guaranteed 2% increases for all schools, a complexity index and a growth factor. The growth factor was structured so many times growing 500 students would equal little to no increase in funding, but growing 501 would bring funding, but only for that 1 kid over 500. Most years, growing schools would receive ~50% funding for their “growth” kids.
Now in those years you had a local General Fund Property Tax Levy, and from my quick research, the amount/child in HSE was about double the amount/child in IPS, thus closing the gap in total funding to an amount that is accounted for by the complexity index. The CI takes into account poverty and other characteristics that you pointed out in your earlier post.
Again, I don’t disagree that there can be differences in per student funding because of the relative ease/difficulty of educating a student population, but I am not sure the current gaps are justifiable. It is also worthwhile to note, that it isn’t just those unsavory rich whites with this problem, my local school which is solidly lower middle class gets the same type of treatment. They receive ~$5,900/kid
Finally, while we can cite stats until the cows come home, we have not even tread in to the political football waters.
Also, the new funding formula is no longer estimates, you can see the actual 2009 numbers and 2010 has been set, just not posted for public consumption yet.
There is nothing partisan about generating a report off of the DOE database. Any one can do it, just go to their website.
The school funding formula is very complex—add students in this category, this activity is to be in this fund and this is to be in another, etc…. Mr. Bennett (and Mitch) have fired the most senior personnel in DOE so trying to get a solid answer on about any matter is a crap shoot (something well over 125 changes including almost every subject matter department head). The budgeting for schools is getting so complex that many superintendents have difficulty and very few school board members could ever follow it all the way. It is likely that reveiw years from now will reveal very distrubing results from the change in funding to sales and income taxes—but doubt anyone will want to accept blame.
Side note: all these announcements of cuts coming right before ISTEP testing when the teacher morale is now at very rock bottom.
Another note: around the state now many in the public are telling their local school boards to not cut this or that–then are saying the board did not listen to what they said. Reality time: many different voices advocating many different things, board does not have as much flexibility as some think they do, that is, certain parts of the local activities can not be cut (ex. mandated programs in such areas as special ed) so this often leaves on a few real choices.
Sad situation and very likely is not over yet as expect at least 3 more years of cuts and at best flat lining. Of course, some will say well we said they could get along with less so why increase spending they are getting by now on less.
My mind isn’t made up about that crew, mainly because they’re so chaotic that you really don’t know what direction they’re going. However, in their defense, at least they’re proposing a way to offset the tax and being upfront about it. Passing a law locking in property tax rates without explaining where the money will come from is just stupid.
I have no respect for the “just cut taxes” group, unless they clearly show what services will be cut or what taxes will replace the taxes they want removed.
The school funding formula is very complex because certain legislative services people and more than a few consultants/lobbyist/attornies who worked for the service previously want to keep it that way. Each time someone would ask a question about the formula, the response would be that it was a difficult question to answer and very complex, and then they would not answer it. I figured out that it was available and started asking pointed questions without letting them off the hook. Chuck did not like that one bit. The formula is not that complex and it has been made less complex thanks to the work of the two researchers down at IU that I helped when we analyzed how each of the pieces used previously actually impacted student achievement and the budget process.
Anyway, those who manipulate the budget have an incentive to keep it fuzzy and hard to explain, which it is not, but it makes it easier to avoid having to answer questions.
I think the lawsuit is a masterful way to get mitch off the hook. Now that his friends and supporters have named him and tony in the lawsuit, neither has to comment on nor answer questions concerning education cuts, school closures, teacher layoffs, music and art program eliminations, etc. Can’t comment, sorry, pending lawsuit.
Kinda takes away one major sore spot for mitch as he seeks to be pulled into national office. Nope, sorry cannot talk about it.
I would agree wit Akla.
You can work the formula with a pencil and basic four function calculator. 99% of the info to fill out the formula is on the DOE website.
The “complex” part is in the magical balancing tools that produce the politically expedient or desired outcomes.
I agree with Akla. The formula is not as complex as people try to make it out to be and it is certainly improved. That said, small changes in enrollment and complexity that are not known until the count in the fall, can make a fairly significant difference in funding. You budget conservatively and hope for the best.