Jackson Free Press

Pontotoc County Superintendent John Simmons has been in his position for only two years, but already knows how strapped for money his county schools are. "Some of our history books are 9 years old," Simmons said. "We've had to raise local taxes, and to make up for the difference we cut about $500,000 last year (from our budget) and about $300,000 this year."

Rural Jefferson Davis County is no better. Education supervisor Wayne Fortenberry says students are entering classrooms with more kids than at any time in the past, despite the student head count decreasing from 3,600 students in 1989 to 2,200 this year.

"Classes today will be the largest classes that many teachers have had to teach," Fortenberry said. "The maximum for high schools is 33, the maximum for lower elementary is 24. We're maximum in everything."

Rural areas like Pontotoc and Jefferson Davis counties are hit hard in terms of school funding. Education has traditionally been funded on a local level through ad valorem taxes. Property value is lower in rural areas, however, and there is less of it, meaning kids in the country generally have less revenue to work with.

Realizing the obvious, Mississippi legislators in the 1990s reasoned that the system amounted to educational disadvantages based on location, and moved to change it. Lawmakers devised a formula requiring the Mississippi Department of Education to select representative "average" school districts based on six factors, including the district's accreditation level. Once the cost of running an average-performing Mississippi school district was down in writing, the Mississippi Adequate Education Program, adopted by the state Legislature in 1997, began arranging for all school districts to pay the same amount of taxes, but to allow the state to supplement tax shortfalls found in poorer, rural districts, essentially leveling the playing field.

Sen. Hob Bryan, D-Amory, explained the process at a recent Stennis Capitol Press luncheon at Hal & Mal's Restaurant. "The local districts are going to make some sort of contribution. We were concerned about the property value as you go from district to district, so we selected a figure of 28 mills," Bryan said. "We require each district to contribute 28 mills to the plan. And the state sent you a check for the rest of it. On a per-student basis, the smaller district is going to get a greater check from the state than, say, Tupelo."

The formula has worked well for the state, according to numerous endorsements. The Mississippi Economic Council, not known for wild-eyed tactics, has fully endorsed the formula, as have prominent business figures like former Netscape CEO and FedEx COO Jim Barksdale, along with a flurry of education enthusiasts. The Northside Sun even endorsed fully funding the formula last week.

Bryan warned that the formula was at risk, however, because a legislative committee is considering "tweaking" the formula. The Commission to Restructure the Mississippi Adequate Education Program, co-chaired by Sen. Mike Chaney, R-Vicksburg, and Rep. Cecil Brown, D-Jackson, met July 26 and will hold similar meetings in August and October.

Bryan said "restructuring the program" may likely translate as "cutting funding," and said that tampering with it should not even be considered.

"We got the bargain of the century when we adopted this program," Bryan said, pointing out that some other states are just now coming to grips with rural vs. urban school funding. Mississippi adopted its own plan at an initial cost of $126 million—chump change considering the price that some other states have been forced to cough up. Also, when Mississippi adopted the plan in 1997, the nation was not yet in the grip of red ink as it is today. The most recent Census Bureau figures say that states got saddled with more than $250 billion in debt in the 2002-03 school year, up 11 percent from the previous year.

"If there's something wrong with the government, and our spending is all out of control, and we're wasting all this money (on education), how come we're 47th in the nation on per-student educational spending? We're 47th in the nation, and we're forming a committee to see if we're spending too much money on public education? I tell you, it doesn't pass the straight face test," Bryan said.

The Census Bureau revealed in March that Washington, D.C., New Jersey and New York each spent more than $12,000 per pupil. Utah ranked last in per-pupil spending at nearly $4,900, while Arizona and Mississippi each spent less than $6,000 per student.

Despite the state's comparatively lower education spending, MAEP returns as a thorn because the state routinely failed to fully fund it until FY 03, with another unsuccessful fight to do so again in FY 04. Bryan said the state has risked lawsuits in not fully funding MAEP.

"Once the lawsuit is filed, we start pitting district against district, and the consensus that we have among all the districts begins to fall apart, and that's not going to be good for public education," Bryan said.

Chaney said his commission has no intention of cutting funding to the program. "That's only one person saying that, and that's Hob Bryan. That is not what it's doing, and he's wrong to say that," said Chaney, adding that the commission is seeking to "even out some of the funding mechanisms for high-growth districts like Rankin, Madison and Desoto Counties."

"We need to know we're getting results for the money that we're putting in. For example, the Department of Education is asking for a 12 percent increase this next year on top of what we've just done at 7.2 percent. And that's not a number that's realistic," Chaney said.

"Three percent is probably more realistic. The PEER (Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review) Committee did a report in 2002. It took the 25 most expensive districts in Level 3 and their request even for those Level 3 districts was $119 million less than what the state department asked for," said Chaney, who says the Legislature may recalibrate the formula by plugging it into a more modern version of what constitutes an "average" school district.

Still, Fortenberry said the very idea of tweaking MAEP should make superintendents nervous, especially those who work in counties like Jefferson County, which suffers a 9 percent unemployment rate. "If MAEP gets restructured and loses money, some people are going to have to lose jobs. We got about $400,000 in cuts last year. The year before that was about $800,000," Fortenberry said. "We're already paying for a lot of things on the local level. That teacher pay raise that was mandated a few years ago, we had to pay for on a local level, as well as employer insurance, and textbook money."

Brown, an activist for public school funding, assures that he didn't expect any tweaking to "decrease spending at all."

"When the formula was adopted, it was based on the average Level 3 school district, but we don't have Level 3 school districts anymore. The law was changed to abolish the ranking of school districts, so you can't apply that formula to a district that doesn't exist. What we're having to do now is make up hypothetical school districts based on average school ratings. … Cutting school funding is not my intention and as far as I know of Sen. Chaney, that's not his intention, either," Brown said.