With seven regional meetings being held on Tuesday night across the state the Our Schools Now! initiative got off to a small start in Southeastern Utah. Only a few more than two dozen people showed up to attend it.
Regardless, the meeting was informative for those that came from the five county area it covered with some people driving as much as 200 miles to attend the gathering at Castle Heights Elementary School in Price. And many who attended didn’t like the idea of a special ballot initiative to raise income and sales taxes to increase funding for public and higher education at all.
“The county just raised our property tax 10 percent a year for the next five years,” said Kerry Jensen ,who operates the Service Master franchise in Carbon County, and whose comments were followed by loud applause. “How much are people going to take? The bleeding has to stop. And there is only one way to stop it and that is for the community to stop it. I call our public schools government schools. We need less of them and more private schools.”
Jensen’s and others remarks came after a presentation concerning the ballot initiative was presented by McKell Withers, a long time Utah educator and the former superintendent of the Salt Lake City School District. Withers’ presentation included background on the initiative, who was involved in putting the idea together, those business leaders presently supporting it and the reasons for its inception.
“Teachers are the most influential people in affecting a child’s success in school,” he said. “That is except for their parents. Research shows that if a child comes from a home that has parents who support education they have like an 85 percent chance of succeeding in school. On the other hand if they don’t have support the figures are almost reversed, 75-80 percent will not succeed. That is why we need to have the best teachers and have the funding to keep the best teachers.”
He went on to talk about how teachers attain their best skills after about four or five years of teaching, but that the loss factors in keeping teachers shows that many leave in those first five years. Much of that loss is because they can make more money elsewhere. That is why some districts in the state have been working independently to raise taxes in their areas to give teachers better pay.
“How we fund schools impacts this,” he said. “Utah only gets a C-minus for the quality of education and only eight states in the nation get a worse rating.”
It used to be that schools got 100 percent of the income tax generated in the state for education but revisions in the tax code a number of years ago changed that and some of the money is going other places now. This has resulted in a $1.2 billion decrease in overall funding for public schools.
Withers then showed programs where extra grant funding in some Utah schools had improved graduation rates, teacher retention, and disciplinary referrals to correct improper habits and behaviors. He said that unfortunately all these grants ran out eventually and without continued funding the programs can’t continue.
The Our Schools Now! ballot initiative is intended to make up some of the funding loss from the tax code revisions and bring Utah’s school funding in line with the average states across the country funding levels.
The initiative proposes that the state’s sales tax be raised from 4.7 percent to 5.2 percent and that the income tax rate go from 5 percent to 5.5 percent. After a three- year phase-in, those two moves would generate about $700,000 million more a year for education in the state and would cost the median income family in Utah about $35 more per month. The revenue would be divided equally based on the per student population of a school.
“For instance this school (Castle Heights Elementary) would get about $417,000 more per year,” said Withers. He also said some money from the move would go to public colleges as well with “USU Eastern getting an additional $1,376,000” if the ballot initiative passed.
“All the money would be invested in the classroom, not for construction or for administration,” he said. “Each school would create its own plan on how to spend the money and those plans would have to be posted on the school website.”
There was some discussion after that statement concerning who would formulate those plans and it was suggested that School Community Councils that already exist within the framework of the School Institutional Trust Lands money expenditures could be used.
The generated money would be invested in either teacher compensation, class size reduction, professional development for teachers or for technology (hardware and software).
Those who propose the ballot initiative (which would appear on the November 2018 ballot) have until April 15 of next year to gather 113,143 signatures to place it there. In addition those signatures must come from registered voters and the 26 of the 29 senate districts in the state must have 10 percent of the registered voters sign up.
Since the meeting was a public hearingm, all comments were being recorded so that they could be evaluated and taken into account by those who are working on the initiative.
Like Jensen, almost everyone who spoke to the issue in the last half of the meeting opposed the initiative for various reasons, with the exception of one person, Jeff Richens, who is the vice president of the Carbon Board of Education.
“In the southeastern Utah area local school boards have neither opposed or support Our Schools Now and the Utah School Boards Association, which all school boards are part of, elected to not take a position as well,” he said.
Richens did point out too that if the initiative passed, the legislature may look at it what it presently does in terms of education funding and change the present funding system for schools.
“You talk to almost anyone who is in the legislature and they are opposed to this,” he said. “When you ask the question about funding and what might happen you get no answers because this hasn’t played out yet. Could they reduce freeze the amount they give or could the even reduce it to zero? No one will answer that right now.”
Various speakers brought up problems with the schools that they don’t feel extra funding would fix. Others, like Jensen felt that taxes were high enough and at least one felt that that extra money might be ripe for fraud. Others just felt that there is already enough money to run the schools properly.
“I graduated from a teachers’ college in Pennsylvania in 1972 and later one of my friends from school went on to head up the Detroit (Michigan) public schools,” said Ed Riff. “He quit because he said he couldn’t do his job even though he had enough money to do it because of the politics and the federal government’s involvement. I think that there is a enough money in education, but I don’t think we are using it wisely.”
There was also some concern by members of the audience that the meeting was not well publicized. Some said they had only heard about that afternoon, by phone or by email. However a public notice concerning the meeting did run in the Sun Advocate, Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News on July 6.
Our Schools Now regional public meeting sparsely attended
There were a lot of empty chairs at the meeting at Castle Heights Elementary.