Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 27, 1995 TAG: 9503010010
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
That old fuss about how the children in some Virginia districts have more than twice as much spent on their schooling as children in some other districts?
About how the 10 wealthiest school divisions average 82 teachers per 1,000 students, while the 10 poorest divisions average 66 teachers per 1,000 students?
About how some districts spend 12 times more per pupil for instructional supplies than others, and 22 times more for library books and supplies?
Disparity is still with us.
Numbers like the above weren't enough to convince the Virginia Supreme Court last year to order changes in Virginia's school-funding system. But as noted by a former state deputy secretary of education in a recent edition of the News Letter of the University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, neither did the courts give the school-financing system a ringing endorsement. The courts said only that the Virginia Constitution puts the issue in the hands of the General Assembly, writes Suzette Denslow, formerly in the administration of ex-Gov. Douglas Wilder and now deputy director of the Virginia Municipal League.
Lawmakers have taken some steps since the issue emerged into prominence in the late '80s. In 1992, the General Assembly upped the appropriation for basic state school aid to localities for the 1992-94 biennium. In 1994, lawmakers appropriated money for dropout-prevention and other special programs for the 1994-96 biennium, in accord with recommendations that the dispensing of state school money take into account the higher costs for divisions with disproportionate numbers of special-needs students or students living in poverty.
The General Assembly also has kept alive its Commission on Equity in Public Education, to continue looking for incremental improvements that would reduce disparity.
But a broadly supported legislative effort in 1994 to write that year's anti-disparity programs into permanent law was vetoed by Gov. George Allen, on the grounds it would constitute an unfunded mandate on local government. This year, Allen has sought to cut 1995-96 state spending for those programs, although the money is restored in the General Assembly's version of the budget.
Yet most students of the disparity issue, including Denslow, conclude that higher levels of state school funding are essential to a solution. They do so for reasons both technical and practical.
The practical consideration is that without an overall increase in state school aid, more state money for poor districts can come only if there is less state money for wealthy districts. This is not politically feasible.
The technical consideration lies in the fact that virtually every school division in Virginia - including the poorest and least education-minded (not necessarily the same) - has found it must pay more to meet minimum standards than is reckoned by the state's wealth-based matching formula for distributing school money. This is one major source of disparity: Poorer divisions have a harder time raising the additional money than do wealthier localities, which typically provide local money for school programs far beyond the minimum anyway.
Whether overall school spending in Virginia is too little or too much, in other words, anti-disparity considerations suggest that the state's portion of the total should rise.
In the legislative session just concluded, the General Assembly resisted attempts by Gov. Allen to cut disparity-related items from the second half of the 1994-96 budget. The bigger disparity question, however, is what the governor will propose in 1996 for the 1996-98 budget and how a newly elected legislature will respond.
by CNB