Let’s face it; cities around Mississippi are broke.
And it doesn’t take much traveling to see that. With ever-declining tax bases and crumbling infrastructure, it is hard to believe that local taxpayers could afford to fund the state educational system.
EdBuild, the consultant hired to recommend changes to the Mississippi school funding formula, suggests that the state save money by shifting more of the burden for funding public schools down to the local level. They propose to accomplish this by eliminating the “27 percent option” in the equity provision of the Mississippi Adequate Education Program, the Mississippi school funding law.
Currently, school districts are required to pay a local contribution in an amount equal to 27 percent of the base student cost or the amount of tax revenue that 28 mills generates in the local community, whichever is less. This equity portion was put into place to ensure that property-poor communities were subsidized by the state so that all children in Mississippi could be educated evenly, no matter where they lived.
The “27 percent option” also protected property-rich districts from having to foot the entire education bill for their students at the local level. The Mississippi constitution states that it is the obligation of the state to provide a public education for Mississippi children.
The top job of the state is to ensure that all students receive an adequate education, and it needs the right funding to make this happen.
Under the new proposal the Legislature will keep all of the tax dollars we are currently sending to the state level, but will reduce significantly the education funding that it will send back to our local school districts. What does this mean to you? It could mean a significant increase in property taxes around the corner to pick up the state slack.
Among the school districts that would be the hardest hit by the removal of the 27 percent option are some of the districts with very high levels of poverty. The effect is so dramatic that in some cases there are school districts that would currently be receiving no state funding at all, were the 27% provision not in place. One of these districts has a student poverty rate of more than 90%.
The major problem behind the propsal, however, is that the state cannot mandate that a community raise taxes to meet the needed local contribution. So what happens if the local community declines to raise taxes or is unable to do so? Then the students in those school districts might be simply out of luck and the district would take a massive hit.
I’m not saying that MAEP does not need to be revamped, because it does. However, all aspects of the funding model need to be looked at beforehand.
Joseph Brown is the editor and publisher of The Star-Herald. He can be reached at jbrown@starherald.net.
