Our
School Funding—A
Short History by Kim Wilbanks.
Public schools in America have always been funded from a variety
of sources including local, state, and federal tax dollars. A
percentage of the property taxes collected from property owners
in each county is earmarked for the schools. In many small
rural areas, such as ours, a substantial amount of the land in
the county is owned by the government, in the form of National
Forests. No property taxes can be collected on this land,
so our schools receive far less funding from tax dollars than
do schools in areas with more privately owned, taxable land.
The federal government recognized this problem when Congress
first established the National Forests in the early 20th century. This
action permanently removed these forest lands from potential
tax paying private development. In order to financially
compensate for this loss, Congress allocated 25% of all revenues
derived from the National Forests to adjacent communities to
support local roads and schools.
The main source of this funding has historically been timber
receipts, but funds also came in from recreation fees, grazing
permits, and special use permits. This worked well
for almost a century, providing small communities surrounded
by government lands with funding comparable to that enjoyed
by communities in areas surrounded mostly by privately owned
land. However, in the early 90’s the revenues from
our National Forests began to decline primarily due to a precipitous
drop in timber sales. According to Yvonne Bales, Deputy
Superintendent of Business Services at the Plumas County Office
of Education, school district funding from forest reserves
dropped from $2,783,482.00 in 1993 to $161,198.00 in 2001.
In 2000, recognizing the disastrous impact of this shortfall
in funding, Congress implemented a temporary stop-gap measure
by passing the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination
Act (PL 106-393), often referred to simply as “Secure
Rural Schools”, or SRS. This funding was intended to
provide impacted areas with funding while they sorted out and
permanently solved this funding crises.
To date, no long-term solution to these funding difficulties
has been developed in most affected areas of the country, including
Plumas County. Being “short term”, this SRS
funding expired in 2006. We saw devastating, widespread
cuts throughout our school system as the district office scrambled
to make ends meet in light of our drastically reduced budget. Last
month Congress approved a one-year extension of SRS funding. This
extension expires in 2007. Thus, it does not even carry
us through the upcoming school year, which means that next
spring our schools will be facing the same turmoil we struggled
with this spring. Clearly this one year SRS funding extension
is at best a temporary band-aid for a severe, ongoing problem.
Some of the questions that all this raises include:
- Should the federal government continue to compensate rural
areas, such as Plumas County, where income from taxes is
limited by a preponderance of federally owned land?
- What effect does this instability in funding, and the resulting
turmoil, have on our schools and our personnel?
- What does the future hold in the way of school funding?
I’ll be looking into other funding sources next week,
and explaining terms such as “Revenue Limits” and “Basic
Aid”. Thank you for continuing to check this section
of the paper weekly, taking time to understand the difficult
situation faced by our schools. Please join us at the
next SOS meeting in the Plumas Sierra Rural Electric Company’s
meeting room on Wednesday, July 11th, at 6:00 P.M. Check
our website at www.plumassos.net for
additional information.
And a BIG welcome to the Quincy branch of the Plumas SOS effort. They
will be holding their first meeting next Tuesday, July 10th,
at 6:00 in the PUSD district office board room. Come
find out what we’re all about, and how you can get involved.
Kim Wilbanks
Concerned Parent
SOS (Save Our Schools) Member |
