Commenting on an earlier post, someone stated that it was tough to get Utah voters worked up about education funding. Though that statement was off the mark, I figured the learned readership of this site would have strong opinions on education funding in the Beehive State and, I hope, even a few ideas. Let me lay out a challenge and, then, a few facts and observations.<\/p>\n
The Challenge: I’d guess many readers hypothecate, “If I were in the legislature, I’d really ramp up education funding.” Right? Okay, the challenge is to specify how you’d do that (because I agree with the sentiment, but find the reality a bit tougher). By the way, this year we did increase public education funding 5.6%.<\/p>\n
Facts and observations: Utah spends a greater percentage of its budget on public education than most other states; however, Utah’s per-pupil funding is lower than that of any other state. How are these incongruous facts explained? First, Utah has far more children per capita than any other state; so, in calculating per-student funding, the relatively large total amount spent on education is divided among lots of students. Second, most of Utah’s property-tax base is siphoned off by the federal government; 66% of the land in Utah is owned by the federal government, meaning it does not contribute to the property tax base, which is a major source of education funding in most states.<\/p>\n
The main options for increasing education funding are to (1) raise taxes (in a state that has the 9th highest tax burden in the nation) or (2) shift money from other state departments. The three departments with enough money to make much of a difference are Health and Human Services (e.g., Medicaid, people with disabilities), Higher Education (already the portion paid by students through tuition is moving from 25% toward 35%), and Transportation (where realistic projections are that we face billions of dollars of unfunded need — largely because of the State’s incredible growth rate). Other options require more creativity. I have a few ideas that I will post toward the end of the comments, but I don’t want to stifle your creativity by listing them here. Though you can check out my website (www.steveu.com), to see the reasons I favor using cash instead of credit for capital infrastructure (i.e., roads and buildings).<\/p>\n
If you want to dig into the budget (to move money around, for example), a very good summary can be found at the legislative homepage, www.le.state.ut.us. Good luck! The winner will get naming rights to an elementary school.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Commenting on an earlier post, someone stated that it was tough to get Utah voters worked up about education funding. Though that statement was off the mark, I figured the learned readership of this site would have strong opinions on education funding in the Beehive State and, I hope, even a few ideas. Let me lay out a challenge and, then, a few facts and observations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn","category-news-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/60"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2081\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}