Can’t marry tax cuts and school funding? You can’t divorce them

By CINDI ROSS SCOPPE

Asscoiate Editor

IT WAS A surreal moment that perfectly summarizes the surreal debate that’s going on inside the State House.

The Senate had just refused to kill Sen. Larry Grooms’ proposal for the state to take over responsibility for funding public schools, and Senate Rules Chairman Larry Martin was dressing down Sen. Grooms for even proposing such a thing.

Normally, Sen. Martin said, making no effort to disguise his indignation, the Senate wouldn’t even discuss such a sweeping change unless it had first been approved by the Senate Finance Committee. This one hadn’t even been considered.

Sen. Jim Ritchie chimed in to complain that the Senate had been discussing property tax reform for nearly a year, not school funding. It was wrong, he said, to try to interject a whole new issue into the debate so late in the process. (Never mind that the property taxes in question were the ones that pay for ... schools.)

One of them, I didn’t write down which one, made the point that the Finance Committee had avoided the whole question of how school funds would be distributed, because it was just too difficult to resolve. This was said as though it somehow bolstered their argument.

So let me get this straight: It’s wrong to change the way we fund public schools unless the Finance Committee has approved it, but it’s too difficult for the Finance Committee to even discuss.

Isn’t that the same as saying it’s wrong to change the we way fund public schools?

Several reasonable senators have looked me straight in the eye and insisted that property tax relief and school funding are two separate issues. More than that, they have told me that you cannot marry them ... that it is foolish — foolish — even to try.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it makes all the sense in the world to replace all local school funding with funding from the state and not consider how that money is going to be distributed.

But it seems obvious to me that you’re going to have to use some kind of formula to distribute that state money. And it’s either going to be a formula that maintains the status quo or one that changes it.

Nearly everybody in the Senate seems to agree that we need to change the school funding formulas we use today. Just not now. Not on the fly. Not while we’re debating property taxes.

Normally, I would be the first to demand a careful study. Heck, I’ve spent nearly a decade urging legislators to undertake a comprehensive study of our tax and spending system — a study that would have to be built around the way we pay for schools, since they are the largest recipient of state revenue.

But lawmakers have ignored those pleas. Or paid lip service to them. And now they propose to overhaul the taxing part of the equation while doing absolutely nothing to change the spending side. Which is to say they propose to lock in the current inequities.

If not now, when?

Senate Education Chairman John Courson has been telling me for weeks now that he and Finance Chairman Hugh Leatherman want to have a special committee study school funding formulas over the summer and fall. He keeps hedging with words like “might” and “probably,” but he’s said it enough times now — even announcing it to the full Senate week before last — that I think it’s a safe bet that it’ll happen, if the Legislature doesn’t adopt the Grooms approach first.

Sen. Courson is certain this committee will come up with a plan to overhaul a hodgepodge of confusing funding streams that date to the 1970s. And that the Senate will adopt this plan.

He could be correct. The Senate is a different kind of animal, and when senior members set their minds to something, it usually happens, even if it defies conventional partisan stereotypes.

But then what?

What will prompt the House — which does not defy partisan stereotypes — even to consider such a plan?

The Grooms plan — now Grooms-Sheheen — draws its inspiration from the old Quinn-Sheheen plan, which drew its inspiration from “Let’s Make a Deal.” Republicans would support Quinn-Sheheen, the thinking went, because it offered a massive property tax cut; Democrats would support it because it provided school funding equity. That is, it guaranteed that the same amount of money would be spent to educate a poor child in Jasper County as a poor child in York County. And that this would be more than what was spent to educate a middle-class child anywhere in the state, since poor kids start off so far behind their peers.

The House didn’t go for the deal when Mr. Quinn was majority leader, and it didn’t go for it this year, because Republicans figured they’re powerful enough that they can get the property tax cuts they want without giving up anything in return.

If the Senate proves them right, and gives them property tax cuts without any strings attached, it will give up any leverage to force a debate on school funding for the foreseeable future.

The fact is, if senators don’t marry school funding to property tax cuts, they’re leaving true school reform at the altar.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.