By Rep. Marjorie Porter, D-Hillsborough
A few weeks ago, a constituent sent a thought-provoking email to all five of the legislators representing her in Concord — two Democrats, three Republicans.
The subject line reads “NH Ranks Last in School Funding” and begins, “This is shameful and unacceptable.” We’ve had a school funding crisis for decades now, she continued. The over-reliance on property taxes to fund our schools has not changed; her property taxes keep going up; she saw no bills before us that would change things.
But it was her last sentence that stopped me in my tracks. “I’d appreciate understanding how you are all working together to solve this problem once and for all.”
I’ve been struggling with an answer ever since.
She is correct. The education funding issue has plagued NH for decades, well before the Claremont decisions in the 1990s. We were last in the nation in state funding for education then too.
The Claremont lawsuits shone a spotlight on the inequity of the state’s over-reliance on local property taxes to fund our schools, and resulted in the courts saying yes, indeed, the state is required to fund an adequate public education. They left it up to the legislature to figure out just what comprised an adequate education, how much it cost to provide it, and how to pay for it. They set a time limit. Get it done by 2007, or we will do it for you.
It was the paying for it part that was the kicker. With NH’s strong aversion to taxes, finding the revenue to pay for the state’s share of the cost to educate our children created a huge problem.
I wasn’t in the legislature in 2007, when they finally came up with the system we use today, so I was not privy to the ins and outs of the sausage-making. I’ve always found the solution interesting.
First, they figured out just what was needed to provide an adequate education, then how much it cost to provide it. At the time, school districts around the state were spending between $12,000 and $14,000 per student, but the legislature figured a base grant of $3,450 sufficient. Districts would receive additional funds for children experiencing learning challenges for various reasons. The maximum possible grant per student in challenging districts was somewhere in the $6-7,000 range. Over the years, this formula has been tinkered with and today the base grant stands at $3,786, plus the extras where needed.
Given the stranglehold Americans for Prosperity has on today’s Republican legislators, that they actually created a new state tax to help pay for it seems unbelievable to me. But they did. Remember, over-reliance on property taxes and the inequity this caused was the reason for the Claremont lawsuits. I guess they all must have looked past the irony, because this new tax was—you guessed it—a property tax!
The Statewide Education Property Tax—or SWEPT—works like this. The state sets a universal property tax rate, applied to all properties around the state. Towns and cities collect the tax along with the local town and school taxes. But instead of sending this state tax money to the state, they keep it, to apply toward what the state owes the school in aid. If they don’t collect enough to equal what the state owes (most towns don’t), the state makes up the difference with money from the Education Trust Fund, funded by the lottery and business and tobacco taxes, among others.
But what if a town collects more money than the state owes to them? This does happen in a number of places, especially second-home property rich towns. Do they send the extra state tax money to the state, to help pay for other less wealthy towns’ schools? Originally, yes. But those towns complained; not fair to make them pay for another community’s kids, they said.
As a result, they now get to keep the extra money, to use as they see fit. For some communities the figures are in the many-multi-million-dollar range. This is one reason Waterville Valley can spend $57,000 per pupil in its schools, when the state average is $16,824. It’s hard not to see the inequity there.
So here we are. Still last in the nation, with a whopping 73% of our revenues for education coming from property taxes.
And now for the tough part. How are we working together to fix the problem?
To be honest, I can’t see that we are. Sure, none of us are talking about new taxes. But that’s about the only place we seem to agree.
Last term, when revenues were better than expected, Democrats included in the budget the largest increase in education funding in more than twenty years. The governor vetoed that budget, and getting it passed meant compromising, making those funds a one-time deal.
Last term, recognizing the need to find a solution to our funding crisis, Democrats established a commission to study school funding, hired experts in the field to help, and worked tirelessly for months to find a way to solve the problem. The commission made some excellent recommendations, including making sure our resources go to the neediest districts. But the Republicans in control now have chosen to ignore the work of the commission and discredit the recommendations.
Instead, they have pursued what can only be seen as an anti-public school agenda. Bills have passed making it harder for schools to receive the money due them from the state. They’ve prioritized the passage of the highly unpopular SB 130, establishing the most extreme school voucher program in the country. This program will undermine our schools and cost the Education Trust Fund, and local taxpayers, many millions of dollars over the coming years by diverting tax dollars to private schools.
Revenues estimates have come in $130 million higher than expected this year. Instead of sending aid to our neediest schools where it can do the most good, Republican budget writers chose to use $100 million to give us a one-time tax cut on our SWEPT tax bill. Sounds great, but it’s really not that much.
With our “savings” my husband and I can have a nice meal out, if we don’t buy drinks.
And oh, remember those wealthy towns that get to keep their extra SWEPT money? $17 million of that $100 million is going to them, to make up for lost revenues from the cut.
I wonder what the Court will decide in the ConVal school funding suit, don’t you?