The US needs a better way to pay for public education

Walking the Beat

This isn't the column I had intended to write after everything that started happening on college campuses around the country this week, including at least one or two to which I have personal ties. But I'm going to have to let that topic simmer for a bit as I – and indeed all of us in Anaconda – need to look a little bit closer to home right now on the topic of education, as with the school election coming up fast time is of the essence.

While I'm a graduate of a private college and a private university, I'm a proud product of public K-12 education. And yet it's easy for me to say that having parents who sacrificed so much so that we could live in a small, affluent suburb on frankly lower-middle class wages so that I could attend a school where the main obstacle to a quality education – funding – was hardly an obstacle at all. Even with it being a town very similar in population numbers to Anaconda and with little in the way of industry or other high tax rate properties to offset the burden on residential property owners, when an ordinary single-family home there today is going for over a million bucks now, it makes it a lot easier to ratchet up the per-child spending on public schools than when you have the same kind of tax base but with much lower property values.

Make no mistake, I'm in favor of Anaconda's school levies this year for the same reason that I was last year – these kids need all the help they can get, especially where their health and safety is concerned, which is what these tax dollars specifically would be spent on – but there needs to be a better way of doing things because it is simply put an injustice to have to rely on either the genetic lottery or parents willing to work themselves to death so as to live in a wealthy district. 

Montana has done better this past year, I will give it that, with census.gov indicating an increase in per-child funding on par with what's happening nationwide, but when you're already toward the bottom of the list in raw numbers at around $12,000 a year, roughly the same as Louisiana's and about $4,000 shy of the national average, while at the same time the cost of living here has skyrocketed, well it's hard to see that as being at all fair to the next generation who – yes it's cliche – really are our future. None of us are getting any younger, and we're going to rely on today's teenagers to be tomorrow's thirty-somethings doing the work us current forty-somethings will be retiring from in 20 years. It is incumbent upon us as a country to find a better way to pay for public schools, which are a public good as much as the air we breathe. 

As to that better way, I will tackle that matter next week.