Volusia's conundrum

Poorer public schools, higher expectations


On Monday the Volusia County School Board approved a $988 million budget for 2009-2010, and a 4.6 percent increase in the school property tax rate. The numbers aren't as large as they seem. And county taxpayers, for all the gripes at the ballot box and elsewhere, are still paying among the lowest school taxes in the country. The district is paying the price. Its budget is the reflection of an operation on the defensive -- doing more with less, shrinking or delaying projects, eliminating staff and programs, and spending about 6 percent less than last year.

Yet consider this. Even with the tax-rate increase, the school property tax rate is 21.3 percent lower than it was 10 years ago. Property values increased significantly along the way, increasing the amount of taxes homeowners paid. But increasing values also increased wealth and property owners' ability to pay school taxes. At the height of the housing bubble in 2007 and 2008, the average household in Volusia County paid about $1,000 in school property taxes. Considering that the average household pays about $540 a year for cable television, paying less than twice that to educate the county's children is a bargain.

Meanwhile, for all the population decline of the past two years, the district is still serving 3,000 more students today in its 76 schools than it did in 2000 (when it had 68 schools). The increase alone is the equivalent of a small school district. The effect on the district's schools is proportionately larger, because the district has had to implement the constitutional amendment reducing class sizes (and consequently increasing staff more than it otherwise would have had to). Reducing class sizes is a fine idea. But voters followed that up with another amendment almost two years ago that reduced local government revenue. So well before the financial crisis, the district was put on the defensive.

It's not as if Volusia schools had much to work with, either from state or local funding sources. In 2005 (the last year for which figures are available) Florida was spending 28.4 percent of state and local taxpayer dollars on education. It was the lowest level in the continental United States. Hawaii was tied with Florida. Alaska spent 26.8 percent, although Alaska is tops in per-capita spending on education, at $3,527. In that category, Florida is second from last, at $1,807. Only Tennessee is lower, at $1,717. (The national average is $2,330.)

It was from that base that the School Board had to face the twin effects of two successive years of population declines and declining tax and impact-fee revenue from the economic downturn. The $988 million budget it just approved is $93.3 million smaller than last year's -- including the $46 million the district received in federal stimulus money, which helped save several hundred jobs, and despite a 9 percent increase in health insurance premiums that the district pays for its employees.

The "general operating" side of the ledger -- classroom teachers, administrators, materials like books and computers, building maintenance and transportation -- is less than half the overall budget. But it's also budget to decline by $25 million (after declining by almost $40 million last year). Despite the hundreds of positions saved with stimulus money, there will be fewer teachers, teacher aides and assistant principals. The district's spending on classroom technology is static for the third year in a row (at about $4 million). Beyond operations, the district's capital fund is shrinking even more. A declining population reverses the district's need to build new schools, but existing schools' maintenance, repairs or expansions are being scaled back, too. And the district isn't budgeting any money for school-bus replacement in any of the next four years.

Those are the sort of things -- less-maintained schools, older buses, fewer aides in classrooms -- that parents notice and rightfully complain about. But not so rightfully if they're the same parents who voted for tax cuts and who demonstrate against "big government." If students are being short-changed, and they are, it isn't because of the economy or events out of local voters' control. It's because of voters' decisions to elect lawmakers who value education poorly and to approve measures that deny local governments, including school boards, the means to invest in students' futures.

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