Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 12, 1992 TAG: 9201130243
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: B-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
DISPARITY: A PLAN, BUT NO MONEY
GOV. WILDER'S six-year plan to correct school-funding inequities, unveiled Thursday, may not be everything that some localities want.Neither, however, is it mere gobbledygook. It meets head-on many of the issues raised by a coalition of poorer districts in its now-withdrawn (for the moment, anyway) court challenge to the current funding system. At the very least, the Wilder plan is - as Halifax County Superintendent Kenneth Walker, the coalition chairman, said - "a good first step."
The rub, as usual in state government these days, is money.
Four key points:
Overall state school appropriations, the governor and the coalition agree, have lagged behind the true costs of providing the quality of basic education that should be available to all Virginia schoolchildren, regardless of place of residence.
This lag has undermined the ability-to-pay distribution formula designed to ensure basic quality in all districts. Districts unable - or, in some cases, unwilling - to fund the gap from local money are left with substandard schools.
Raising overall state school appropriations would benefit poor districts because, under the distribution formula, they get up to four times as many state dollars per student as do wealthy districts. But it also would demand a greater local match in places that now barely exceed their wealth-based local match - a result noted in the governor's plan but often soft-pedaled by others.
Poorer localities, the governor and the coalition also agree, need help with capital as well as operating costs.
Currently, construction or renovation of school buildings is a local responsibility; the unsurprising result is that children in poorer localities are more apt to be taught in rundown or overcrowded buildings. Wilder proposes a long-term capital-assistance program under which the state would help pay for school capital outlay, based on how critically the outlay is needed and how much the locality can afford to pay.
In a similar vein, the governor's plan calls for short-term relief for the poorest districts in such areas as instructional supplies and computers.
Localities with special needs, the governor and the coalition seem to agree, should be given extra assistance - but the governor and the coalition may well see those needs differently.
The coalition, most of whose members are rural districts, tends to talk up such things as the cost of transportation services in thinly populated localities. Wilder's plan focuses on helping localities with higher-than-average numbers of costlier-to-educate special-education students, at-risk students, gifted students, and students for whom English is a second language - characteristics more likely to be found in urban districts.
On two points - applying the ability-to-pay formula to the distribution to localities of school sales-tax revenues, and eliminating the rule by which no district gets less than 20 cents per student to meet basic operating costs - the coalition and the governor disagree.
As for the former, says the executive summary of Wilder's plan, "the negative effects on a few [affluent] localities would offset the minor positive effects . . . ." As for the latter, it "would save only a small sum of state funds, but would create an undue hardship on eight localities."
Translation: Fair's fair, but it's sometimes politically impractical.
All this is academic, however, unless the plan acquires a visible means of financial support. For the coming biennium, its implementation would require as much as $219 million in additional spending, then $311 million in 1994-96 and $360 million in 1996-98.
One thing's sure: The money won't be found to transfer from other parts of a proposed '92-'94 budget remarkable for its parsimony. And Wilder, apparently having exhausted his tax-raising courage on his proposal for a Medicaid-related levy on health-care providers, doesn't seem in a mood to suggest where the new school money should come from. Somebody'll have to.