EDITORIAL: Legislature, do your duty
Facing a budget deficit that could close an elementary school, increase class sizes, eliminate jobs and reduce the number of days students go to school, Coeur d’Alene School District would love to hear a bugle over the next hill, heralding a desperately needed cavalry charge.
Instead: The sound of paper shuffling.
The district’s $6 million deficit, which must be confronted before the new fiscal year begins July 1, is brought on primarily by declining enrollment combined with the state reverting to a flawed funding formula that only five other states use.
The daily attendance formula is, quite simply, an excuse to weaken public education rather than sustain it so it can compete with private and religious schools that don’t face the same mandates or scrutiny public educators live with every day.
That paper shuffling? It’s Idaho legislators going through House Bill 447. At precisely the time public education needs all the constitutionally mandated support lawmakers should muster, HB 447 would take millions of education dollars off the table, stuffing it instead in the pockets of parents who’d prefer to send their kids to private and parochial schools.
The latest in a direct assault on public education, HB 447 would give $5,000 per child to families for private education tuition and expenses. Unlike public schools, there’s no provision for taxpayer accountability on how those dollars are spent. There are no income standards. Research suggests the vast majority of potential recipients already have their kids in private or religious schools, nullifying the sales pitch that HB 447 is intended to help parents move their children from public to private schools.
But HB 447 isn’t the lone or even primary culprit. It’s just one more deficit driver, though the timing for districts like Coeur d’Alene could hardly be worse.
The bigger issue is the state’s funding formula. Since the pandemic, Coeur d’Alene and other Idaho school districts have seen declining enrollment. That trend is expected to continue here because the county’s population is getting older and exorbitant housing costs are keeping many families with school-age children away.
Coeur d’Alene School District officials, volunteers and stakeholders are working feverishly to mitigate the impact of a $6 million hit. Time is short. The school board needs to put its stamp of approval on a budget by April 22. What’s so frustrating is that if Idaho was simply doing what the state’s founding fathers instructed, none of this would be necessary.
Sufficient funding would provide a boon to District 271 taxpayers, who would never need to pass a property tax-based levy again.
Sufficient funding would put local public schools on a level playing field with private and religious schools where they could compete for students — a competition public educators would welcome with open arms.
Stopping HB 447 in its tracks and fixing the broken funding formula should be priorities for local legislators, who should never forsake the needs of 9,788 CDA District students for the constitutionally prohibited wants of far fewer.
District patrons should contact their representatives now, while there’s time in the current session to fix this mess. And if all patrons hear is the sound of paper-shuffling and sales pitches that amount to the slow starvation of public education in Idaho, they should keep these dates in mind: May 21 and Nov. 5.
Election days.