Public school funding requires rising above interest groups

"What kind of message do we send our students and teachers when we send them into rundown, overcrowded schools? As we enter this new century, let's show our children that they are our priority. Let's build schools for them."

— U.S Secretary of Education and former S.C. Governor Richard Riley, July 4, 2000.

Anyone who has spent time at an over-crowded public school senses the effects of too many students and not enough space. Hallways are human traffic jams during class changes, teachers without home classrooms shuttle carts from class to class, lunch periods begin early in the morning and continue well into the afternoon, administrators become anxious hall monitors, waiting to respond to the next event of "bad behavior." A seething tension underlies this community of students, teachers and administrators. They have but one constructive choice — adapt, accept the conditions as "normal," and make the best of what the controlling generation has provided them.

In our region, we tend to blame rampant, unbridled growth, but in this case growth is not the singular evil agent. There's an awkward truth at play here. We taxpayers embrace the values of public education, and demand performance and excellence. But our lofty expectations fuzz-out as taxes and funding sources are addressed. Too often important strategic issues such as reliable funding sources for new schools are subordinated to the demands of willing and able special interest groups. Gov. Riley's message eight years ago is that our children must be the one and only "special" interest. In too many South Carolina communities, school facilities and the children who would use them are chunked to the cross currents of raw special interest political discourse. We can and should do better.

In lower Dorchester County, in this budding political season, school funding is a hot-button local issue. There's agreement that Dorchester District 2 schools are in a capacity-planning crisis, but dialogue forums quickly become heated declarations of who should not pay for new schools. Long-term residents, especially those on fixed retirement incomes, consider it unfair that they should pay for incremental school capacities for another generation's children. Residential developers and contractors consider it unfair to burden their "products" with impact fees that would inflate new home prices. And predictably, both incumbent and would-be elected officials mumble when increased taxes are mentioned.

Impact fees, special-taxing districts and adequate public facilities standards are all on the legislative table. Each offers promise of reliable school capacity funding, yet each evokes issues of equity and clarity. Many growth-control leaders fear the Legislature will rush through a bill that will provide the political cover of accomplishment, but policies and formulas that will prove ineffective. It would seem school funding mandates that blend the best of development impact fees, tax increment financing districts and adequate public facilities standards would provide a real solution and political cover. The question is whether that package of logic can be embraced given the special interest realities of our political system.

Excellent public schools require adequate school facilities. But that's not a recent revelation. So why the struggle over so many years in lower Dorchester County? Why should school facilities be inferior to water and sewerage system capacities, sidewalks, green spaces and roadways in development planning? We are reminded that doing the "right thing" too often is an orphan in legislative deliberations and that special interests too often dilute political courage and conviction.

In Dorchester County, the inability of elected leaders to resolve school funding issues is chronic. District 2 has been dealing with crowded schools for a very long time. Consider this excerpted Post and Courier article: "Growing enrollment contributes to the tension by sapping tax money that's available for schools ... school officials say they need more money to hire more teachers and build more classrooms to keep up with enrollment ... they have become increasingly concerned about the district's average class sizes, which ranked among the largest in the state ... this year, the school district budgeted for 16,306 students ... 500 more students than last year ... Dorchester 2 had around 15,500 students five years ago, and 11,269 students 15 years ago. It is one of the fastest growing school districts in the state."

So how long does it take to change a high priority public policy light bulb? That article was published 10 years ago, and in that period, Dorchester 2's major problem has become a crisis. Interest groups clearly have created an organic inertia in the political processing of District 2's new school funding formulas. They have won, public schools have lost.

Back in 1999, school capacities could be addressed by home rule processes and impact fees could be considered in the development permitting processes. That year, the state Legislature removed schools from the local impact fees consideration list. Supporters argued that school funding is a distinct state responsibility that should not be transferred unfairly to developers. The sad reality is that the state has yet to accept such responsibility and school capacity funding remains a very local challenge.

The National Center for Education Statistics concludes that half of U.S. public schools are actually under-enrolled. Less than a quarter are considered over-crowded. These statistics closely reflect South Carolina's profile. So our state has too many over-crowded schools — yet not enough to form a self-propelled lobby. One might argue that under-achieving under-enrolled rural schools with inadequate facilities are a more critical problem than over-crowded schools in high growth districts. In a progressive state that values the public education of its children, there should be no inferior schools for any reason.

This is not rocket science. Reliable and equitable school funding models have evolved in many high-growth states. Somehow, South Carolina's legislative deliberations must rise above interest group equity cries. Apparently, no one was listening in 2000 to Gov. Riley's cautionary message, but today his words should stir the conscience of every elected leader responsible for school funding formulas.

Ron Brinson, a former associate editor of this newspaper, is a Dorchester County resident.