Underfunding schoolchildren
IN MASSACHUSETTS MADNESS, Stoneham votes down a $3 million override, destroying high school sports. Northbridge votes down a $3.7 million override that forces parents to pool personal resources for a $110,000 loan to keep alive sports and after-school clubs.
Taunton voters buck the statewide trends against overrides to approve the borrowing of $18 million to build and repair schools. But in Boston, Brockton, Fall River, Haverhill, and Ware, an ugly reminder of the underfunding of children is the massive loss of $1.6 million in after-school funding.
It is a classic case of the domino effect. The Bush administration cuts after-school funds. The cuts put the state Department of Education in the position of cramming cities and towns into a more shallow barrel for the crabs to pull each other down, bidding for the remaining funds.
The people most crushed by the collapsing dominoes are the children.
"We need to stop the direction Massachusetts is going in," said Geoff Beckwith, executive director of the Massachusetts Municipal Association, the lobbying arm for the Commonwealth's 351 cities and towns.
"It's unfortunate that we're heading to even greater disparities between wealthier towns where cuts may not hurt as much and working-class families who already have enormous pressure on property taxes," Beckwith said. "No one, not even the state, has a handle at this point as to what fees communities charge parents, from band, to drama, to sports. The further we go down this path, the problem gets harder and harder to solve."
The further we go down this path, the more ludicrous it will be to talk about transforming public education, let alone how to plug public colleges into Governor Deval Patrick's goal of making Massachusetts a global base for biotech.
Patrick's proposed Municipal Partnership Act so far appears headed for only partial implementation.
He is making progress on Beacon Hill for provisions which would allow towns to save on employee health coverage by buying insurance through the state and put underperforming municipal pension funds under the state pension fund. He has encountered stiff resistance from legislators and business groups on letting towns raise new revenues with meals and hotel taxes.
With 60 percent of municipalities voting down $60 million of overrides since January, according to the Globe and the MMA, the state has to do more than just save through healthcare and pensions. Depending on the property tax for education and other critical municipal services -- when housing costs are already among the highest in the nation -- not only will widen local disparities, it will handcuff cities like Boston in keeping up with big cities in education and attracting businesses.
Boston, where the high school graduation rate is just 59.1 percent, cannot possibly depend more on the property tax than it already does. According to the Boston Foundation, 58 percent of total revenues in 2003 were derived from the property tax, more than twice as much as New York City or Seattle, nearly four times more than San Francisco and nearly five times more than Chicago.
In a report this year, the foundation detailed how those cities, as well as Denver and Atlanta, have an array of taxes, including those for food and lodging.
Such taxes do not appear to have curtailed either local appetites or out-of-town tourism in any of the above bustling cities.
So it would seem a reasonable risk to have a penny tax if it could raise millions for education.
The report said that without a revamped structure that "decouples the general endeavor of planning from local dependence on a narrow revenue base," Boston will "operate at a disadvantage" to comparable American cities with much more diverse revenue streams.
Similarly, an MMA study conducted by Northeastern University's Center for Urban and Regional Policy found that the state overall will fall behind unless it develops a much more stable local aid pipeline between the state and its communities.
"More and more, municipal leaders must choose to either cut services or ask voters to increase their property taxes," the report said. "Given no other major source of revenue or options, many officials have done both. The long-term negative impact on economic development cannot be underestimated. . . . More than likely, education spending remains inadequate to provide the kinds of K-12 public schools that young families would see as good enough to make them willing to pay higher housing and health care costs in the state so that their kids would have the advantage of a Massachusetts education."
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com. 