Editor, Times-Union: News of the Indiana Legislature’s actions to approve its two-year budget includes the projection of record appropriations for K-12 education. I find that news interesting not because I believe it will fully remedy the cuts to public education of the past several years but because it demonstrates that someone in Indianapolis is beginning to understand that Indiana taxpayers hold their public schools as a higher priority than many in the majority party perceived in recent years. If you check with your local school district, you will likely learn that their total increase in state tax dollars (the monies that now pay for classroom instruction and most employee costs including teachers and principals) will be in the 2 percent range or lower for most districts, with some receiving little or no increase. Kindergarten funding may be reduced to the half-day level even though legislators funded a full-day level for several years and it has become part of each district’s revenue and budget. So what has the super-majority of legislators and the governor developed thus far? For a start, the voucher program is to receive a robust increase and charter schools may well again receive facility funding from the state. In 2013, the Legislature forgave $81,828,253 of Common School Fund loans for charter schools while requiring that traditional local public school district taxpayers remain on the hook for their Common School Fund borrowings that totaled $85,506,760. Most perplexing to many is the fact that charter school facilities and the $81 million that paid for them, once received, belong to the charter school organizers and operators. Those millions of dollars go to private pockets with the state paying the tab using your tax money. Only your local public schools’ debt, with your local property taxes paying the tab, purchases facilities that remain owned by the taxpayers. Why the huge increase in expenditures for vouchers? Is the payback in higher student achievement? No. One voucher supporter recently opined that the public schools were afraid of competition, the stated basis for state funding of vouchers and charter schools. Is that the case? Hardly. Two factors are at play here. The first is the constant relaxing of the income and prior attendance requirements. Initially, only students who had previously attended public school were eligible for the voucher and then only if the family income was low. The prior public school attendance requirement has been removed and the income ceiling has risen substantially. In many cases it is not that public school students are moving to private schools. The voucher students would have gone private anyway. The difference is that many private school attenders now have the state’s taxpayers paying most of the tab. The second factor is that there is no requirement or practice that private schools take every kid who applies in the order in which they register. Competition? Are you serious? Every public school in Indiana is required by Indiana’s Constitution and state law to enroll and to educate every resident child regardless of their abilities or disabilities. Compare to our most able, those you wish you had as students. Then let’s compete. When the rest of the voters finally understand the tax monies and the advantages legislated to the friends and family and big-money supporters who elected so many of those now in office, perhaps real competition will return to the ballot box – where it has been so sorely missing in recent years. Roger Thornton, Bluffton Richard Kline, South Bend Lee Harman, Warsaw Former school superintendents Editor’s Note: This letter was edited to conform more closely to the 500-word limit stated in our “Letters Policy.”
