Press
Schooling State Government
About Education Funding
Smart City Memphis
August 18, 2008
Persistence is always a mandatory attitude when dealing with government, and
that’s even the case when it’s a county commissioner dealing with state
government officials.
It’s taken Shelby County Commissioner Mike Ritz more than a year to get the
approximate data that he requested from state government, but his
relentlessness has finally produced results. As a result, county government
is poised to file a lawsuit against State of Tennessee for failing to fully
and accurately fund local school districts.
Ironically, his basis for the lawsuit is the equal protection clause of the
Tennessee Constitution, the same legal argument made by the rural schools
when they capsized the state’s entire funding system about 16 years ago.
Coming Up Short
In those days, the rural schools argued that they were shortchanged in
school funding. Today, Commissioner Ritz argues convincingly that Memphis
and Shelby County’s students are underfunded by $30 million a year.
He makes his case in perhaps the most complex resolution ever presented to
the board of commissioners, containing a blizzard of numbers and
calculations that shows, in the words of Mr. Ritz, that “our taxpayers, when
our ability to pay is considered, are sacrificing for our kids.”
“Ability to pay” is a telling phrase in the world of Tennessee school
funding, because ever since the BEP (Better Education Program) was passed in
the early 1990s, each county’s fiscal capacity has been determined to set
the amount of state funding and the amount of local funding required by the
state.
Causing Ripples
For years, the school funding formula has been as decipherable as Chinese,
and as a result, local government and school officials have taken state
officials at their word when they said that our community was getting its
fair share.
After spending a year just trying to get data, which he then had to
manipulate to get the final answer, Commissioner Ritz received another
strong message from Nashville: there won’t be a political solution to this
problem. Clearly, however, he’s thrown a rock in the school funding pond and
the ripples are attracting attention in the Capitol.
Undoubtedly, the ripples will be getting larger following the approval of
the board of commissioners of a Ritz-sponsored resolution calling for Shelby
County Attorney Brian Kuhn to “explore, study, and report” on the potential
of hiring “outside counsel” to file suit against state government.
Check’s In The Mail
That said, there’s no need to look for a check from state government anytime
soon. The lawsuits filed by the rural school alliance took just over a
decade to be resolved. The new BEP 2.0 funding law set out a formula that
was supposed to address some funding needs, and it did result in several
millions of new funds for local schools.
However, even with that additional funding, Memphis and Shelby County
schools are falling short of adequate funding. We’ve written before about
the additional taxes that Memphis and Shelby County taxpayers pay for
education as a result of the bulge in school-age children in our community.
When compared to the other 50 largest metros, this bulge is about 20% more
than other regions.
The tax implication of that bulge is about $200 million a year in school
funding alone, but based on Commissioner Ritz’s research, it’s exacerbated
by the $30 million in state funding that never finds its way to our
community.
Calculated Opinion
To reach his conclusions, Mr. Ritz calculated school funding for two fiscal
years, 2005 and 2006, and found that in both years, state funding for local
schools was less than the state average despite our large percentage of
at-risk students and special needs students. For example, state funding of
all public schools in Tennessee in 2006 amounted to $3,318 per Average Daily
Membership (ADM) while local school systems received $3,118 per ADM.
State funding is based on a calculation that includes a county’s property
taxes and its sales taxes, and while some state reports suggest that Shelby
County has one of the state’s highest fiscal capacities, Commissioner Ritz’s
report points out that it’s just not true.
Total property assessment per ADM student in Tennessee is $124,375. For
Memphis and Shelby County, it is $107,433. That compares to $221,382 in
Nashville/Davidson County.
The Obvious
The sales tax statistics tell a similar story. The sales taxes for Tennessee
per ADM were $8,868, but for our community, it is $6,992. For Nashville,
that amount is $15,940.
As a result of these comparisons, Commissioner Ritz’s resolution said that
it is obvious that Shelby County’s taxpayer wealth (property tax) is less
when compared to Tennessee and its taxpayer disposable income (sales tax) is
lower when compared to all of Tennessee.
According to the county resolution, some suggested claims for the outside
counsel to consider are requiring state funding to never be less than local
funding for schools or less than the average state ADM, requiring repayment
of the cumulative underpayment amounts, considering damages for the state’s
past unfair funding, requiring payments to Shelby County that could be used
to pay down its bonded indebtedness, and requiring the state to fairly
calculate payments in the future.
Keeping Attention
All in all, this funding issue – while attracting significantly less
interest than City Council school funding cuts – deserves greater
understanding by the public and firm support from both school systems.
After all, if Commissioner Ritz is right, the school districts would get
more funding, because state law doesn’t allow county government to reduce
its level of funding no matter how much it might get from Tennessee.
Anyone who knows him can say one thing for sure: there’s no chance that
Commissioner Ritz’s persistence will flag.
