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  Home Page » Opinion » Editorial » Colgan Claims Seat

Colgan claims seat

Accounting background will help 9-R board

Congratulations to Joe Colgan for decisively retaining the School District 9-R board seat he was appointed to in August. Colgan, incumbent Jeff Schell and unchallenged candidate Andrew Burns will serve four-year terms. Julia Levy, who also was unopposed, will serve a two-year term.

Colgan, who had a lengthy career teaching accounting at Fort Lewis College and served as an interim finance director for the school district he will now help set policy for, outpolled Bill Bowlby. Bowlby is a contractor with a degree from FLC, and was an elementary school teacher.

Bowlby campaigned partly on the issue of reducing student testing, which received little traction, and during the campaign he praised Colgan. It was a clean contest.

School District 9-R, like every other school district in the state, will almost certainly see a reduction in local tax revenues in 2011.

Reduced property valuations, including in the gas industry, occurring in the 18-month period that will end June 30, 2010, will reduce the district's local tax revenues collected the following spring.

The state, which to varying degrees backfills almost every school district in the state to increase and equalize per pupil school spending, may very well not have sufficient revenues to do that in 2011.

Amendment 23 requires state funding to increase with inflation (the additional 1 percent above inflation will come to an end), but how that mandate in severe economic times competes with mandated Medicaid funding is uncertain. The recession is reducing state income-tax revenues, and just about every other revenue source.

Whether the federal government will step in again to ease fiscal pressure on the states, as it is doing currently with its two-year stimulus funding, remains to be seen. The uncertainties of not knowing if state revenues will be available, and whether Washington will be of help, makes financial planning extremely difficult.

That is the environment in which the school board will be working.

Thanks to every board member. Local control of schools is an American hallmark. Serving requires time, a lot of it, and some positions on policy and personnel will be certain to produce catcalls and criticism.

That the U.S. works to educate all of its youth is still a rarity among countries in the world, and it is good school boards that make that happen.