School districts around the state have been hit with more than $1 billion of state funding take-backs since 2009 because of state revenue shortfalls.
Districts dealt with the cuts as best they could to minimize the hit on kids in the classrooms. At the same time, state legislators in their wisdom passed an assortment of unfunded mandates on districts in the name of student achievement. These suck up teacher and office staff time and may or may not improve what students are able to do by the time they graduate.
Now the state is running nice budget surpluses, and school districts want the money they should have gotten over the past several years.
But the state funding take-backs are continuing - $1.7 million from Bayfield schools just this year, and more than $1 million from Ignacio. I repeat, that's just this school year, not the cumulative total of take-backs since 2009.
School officials want the state to pay the withheld money in a similar time frame, rather than drag it out over many more years; and with no legislative restrictions on how the money can be used.
School finance is a convoluted interplay of the 1994 school finance act, Amendment 23 approved by voters in 2000 to require more school funding, the 1992 TABOR Amendment that restricts revenue and spending increases along with requiring voter approval for any tax increases, and the Gallagher Amendment from the early 1980s that has decreased assessed valuations on residential properties, shifting property tax burdens to commercial properties.
I could do a separate column on how voter-approved constitutional amendments may conflict with each other or have unintended consequences. Such is democracy in Colorado.
TABOR looms over the current school funding discussions. Sometimes government revenue goes up because the economy is good or assessed valuations are up, not because of a tax increase. TABOR dictates that annual revenue increases above a certain amount are "excess" revenue and must be refunded to taxpayers somehow.
In the 1990s, the state was refunding "excess" revenue at the same time it was cutting services and school funding for lack of revenue.
TABOR's "ratchet down effect" means that when government revenue goes down, such as in the worst economy since the 1930s, that becomes the new base for figuring allowable revenue increases. So government revenue cannot recover as the economy does. That's the real diabolical genius of TABOR.
There's the prospect of TABOR refunds kicking in again with current revenue surpluses. TABOR allows voters to approve exemptions (commonly called de-Brucing) to allow a government to keep and spend "excess" revenue. Voters have done that for most local government entities. We might see an attempt to pass statewide de-Brucing.
Last fall, voters soundly rejected Amendment 66 that would have raised the state income tax rate back to what it was in the late 1990s to help fund schools. I have no idea if voters just didn't like the tax increase, or if it was because 66 was so darned complicated. It was both a constitutional amendment and a statutory change. Huh?? I didn't see how it passed the single subject rule, passed by voters in the 1990s, ironically, in response to TABOR.
In contrast, voters in many school districts have approved property tax increases (also known as mill levy over-rides) to maintain or improve educational programs, update technology, raise teacher pay, and the like. State funding take-backs have substantially nullified those local tax increases.
That's part of why school officials are saying, "We're mad as heck, and we're not going to take it any more."
It will be worth paying attention to how this plays out. The discussion might be wonky, but the effects on local schools are real.
