Former teaching colleague from Hillsboro, Walt Hellman-- that's Dr. Hellman to you -- published a longer version of his Oregonian op-ed piece on diminishing school funding in April's edition of Today's OEA. His thesis is this: we are paying less for schools now than we did 15 years ago. Why? Because we have voted either directly (Measure 5, Measure 30) or indirectly (electing anti-tax fools to the legislature) to lower our collective tax burden.
Here are the other salient points he makes, well known to me but maybe not to those who don't pay attention:
- Measure 5, the property tax limitation, was supposed to "force the the passage of a fairer replacement tax." It never happened.
- Measure 5 made school funding a state rather than local responsibility, without a new source of revenue to cover the costs.
- The state income tax "is the same as it was in 1990 and business taxes have been reduced."
- We can't "expect to have a 2005 education system at far below 1990 prices."
- "If we want to adequately fund public education we are going to have to raise some taxes."
The first and the last points remind me of my 1993 school board endorsement interview with the editorial panel at Willamette Week, the same people who urged a yes vote on Measure 5.
When asked by the arrogant Mark Zusman why I wanted to run for school board, I said that my main issue was adequate school funding.
He cut me off, and asked again, "But why do you want to run for school board?" as if I were some naif who didn't realize that the board had no statutory taxing authority. (I should have walked out right then with some curt remark about the Measure 5 endorsement.)
Unsurprisingly, Willamette Week ended up endorsing an anti-tax and (probably) anti-public school candidate with a crackpot scheme for turning every school in the 90 school district into a virtual autonomous entity with full budgetary control over the funds they were allotted.
School funding, of course, wasn't my only issue, but I am firmly convinced that it remains the key issue for the future of public education. Yet I have yet to see any elected member of the school board or any district administrator stand up and call for the tax reform necessary to raise revenues adequate to the task of running a first rate school system.
What we hear instead are calls for program cuts and school closures. Vicki Phillips now wants to cut golf, tennis, and dance to save a few more bucks. And to raise athletic participation fees by $50 per student, which means it would cost $175 to play a school "sponsored" sport.
The once exemplary Portland Public School District is being nickel and dimed into mediocrity.
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