DENVER – Educators vented years of frustration with school budget cuts Monday when the Legislature began work on how to pay for schools since voters rejected a billion-dollar tax increase.
State representatives are touting their bipartisan Student Success Act, which would add $230 million in school funding and pay for some of the reforms the Legislature has enacted but never funded the past decade.
But at a lengthy hearing Monday afternoon, superintendents essentially marked up the bill with red ink and returned it to legislators with a note at the top: “Needs work. See me after class.”
“We beg you to give us the money back we need to serve our children,” said Kirk Banghart, superintendent of Moffat Consolidated School District in the San Luis Valley.
Superintendents from all but eight of the state’s 178 school districts wrote to the Legislature last month and asked for more funding with fewer strings attached. Every superintendent in Southwest Colorado signed the letter.
When the economy tanked in 2009, legislators began cuts to the school budget that now amount to $1 billion. The state pays about $3.8 billion a year for K-12 schools.
The Student Success Act proposes restoring about $100 million of those cuts. At that rate, it would take another decade to bring schools back to their pre-recession funding levels.
“It took us a series of years to get into this situation, and it will take us a series of years to get out of it,” said Rep. Millie Hamner, D-Dillon, who is sponsoring two major school-funding bills discussed Monday.
Superintendents and school boards want an extra $100 million this year, and they don’t want the Legislature to tell them how to spend it.
But Hamner’s fellow sponsor, Rep. Carole Murray, R-Castle Rock, said legislators can’t afford the extra $100 million because it would be a recurring expense that the state couldn’t afford unless its budget grew 16 percent the next two years.
“To see a revenue increase of 16 percent is unheard of,” Murray said.
Last year was tough on public-school advocates. The state Supreme Court ruled against them in a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit, and then voters rejected Amendment 66, which would have raised income taxes for schools.
Amendment 66 offered voters education reforms in return for the tax increase. Legislators are now trying to pass a number of reforms – including financial transparency for schools, a better way of counting students and more money to build charter schools – without the benefit of an extra $1 billion. They found out Monday just how tough the task will be.
Most of the school leaders who packed into the standing-room-only hearing opposed spending $15 million to put districts’ financial information online.
Rep. Lois Court, D-Denver, expressed frustration with criticism of the bill’s sponsors, who she said have worked hard to include ideas from all over the state in their bill.
“Where do you think (the ideas) came from? They didn’t pull these things out of the air,” Court said.
But John McCleary, former superintendent of Crowley County School District, said financial transparency was an idea to get voters to support Amendment 66, and it’s not the highest priority now.
“I think there was a lot of horse-trading and bargaining that went into that, and one of the things that kept popping up was transparency,” McCleary said.
The money would be better spent by reducing past budget cuts, said Jane Urshell, deputy director of the Colorado Association of School Boards.
“This is the Student Success Act, and if we really want students to succeed, we need to get the funding up,” Urshell said.
The House Education Committee did not take any votes on school funding Monday, and sponsors said they would take Monday’s testimony to heart and try to amend their bills later. They have until April 18 to pass the annual school-funding bill.
jhanel@durangoherald.com
