Idaho legislature derelict in addressing public school funding

February 13, 2023

By Mike Weland
Publisher

On Tuesday, March 14, pursuant to Idaho Code, Boundary County School District 101 will ask Boundary County voters to approve a two year, $2.4-million maintenance and operations levy, a biennial chore of decades necessary to keep Naples, Valley View and Mount Hall Elementary Schools, Boundary County Middle School and the Home of the Badgers, Bonners Ferry High School, open. It's an exhaustive and expensive routine in school districts state-wide, unfortunately.

As of 2021, there were 115 school districts in Idaho, 66 public charter schools.

Makes it seem our communities and school districts can't take care of their own, but that perception is wrong. The fault lies with the Idaho legislature, derelict in following the express mandate of Article IX, Section 1 of the Idaho Constitution, which states, "The stability of a republican form of government depending mainly upon the intelligence of the people, it shall be the duty of the legislature of Idaho, to establish and maintain a general, uniform and thorough system of public, free common schools."

According to a  K-12 Public School Buildings Evaluation Report conducted last year at the direction of the Idaho Joint Legislative Oversight Committee, State-wide information on the condition of public school facilities doesn't exist. The last such survey in 1993 found that statewide, school districts had $699.5-million in needed repairs, $1.3 billion when adjusted for inflation.

In 2006, 57 Idaho school districts ran supplemental maintenance and operations levies totaling $99-million. In 2020, the number rose to 92, totaling $214 million. Between 2011 and 2020, districts ran 120 bond proposals to build new schools. Only 49 of them, 41 percent, passed.

Idaho spends $1,000 per student on school buildings, at the bottom of the national per student spending ladder and less than any neighboring state. And spends less per square foot on school facilities than any neighboring state; Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. These states, like Idaho, finance capital projects with local bonds, but vary in requirements to pass such bonds. Idaho requires an election and a two-thirds majority to pass a bond. Washington requires a 60-percent approval margin. Each of the remaining require a simple majority.

Wyoming subsidizes 93-percent of all capital school construction and major maintenance at the state level, other states offer grant or assistance programs to help with school construction, Idaho instead offers the Bond Levy Equalization Program to help qualifying districts pay off interest on existing bonds and the Public School Facilities Cooperative Funding Program, which offers school districts loans to assist districts replace or repair facilities that are unsafe. To be eligible, the district must have failed to pass a bond levy within two years of applying.

In 2001, the Fourth District Court of Idaho found that Idaho's method of funding school buildings through loans was inadequate for the legislature to meet its constitutional duty. The Idaho Supreme Court upheld that decision in 2005, ruling that the Idaho Constitution requires the legislature to provide a thorough education for Idaho’s public-school students in a safe environment conducive to learning, and that the Legislature was not upholding its constitutional duty due to inadequacies of funding mechanism available to districts.

In response, the legislature created Public School Facilities Cooperative Funding program, supplemented lottery dollars given to districts for facilities maintenance and repair, removed some limitations in the Bond Levy Equalization Program and required districts to set aside two percent of building replacement value each year for facilities maintenance and repair. In 2006, they also eliminated the maintenance and operations local property tax levy, increased the state sales tax from five to six percent so as to provide more state revenue to districts.

There is little doubt that a statewide school facilities survey conducted today would find no improvement over the 1993 survey. It is reasonable to assume the situation today is even worse.

Yet our legislators haven't proposed a single bill to address school funding, to shoulder their responsibility.

Instead, citing choice and "parental rights," our legislators are deliberately intent on violating the precepts of the Idaho constitution on education, exacerbating an already critical condition.

A dozen "conservative" Idaho Freedom Caucus legislators last month released their proposed "School Choice" plan to allow "parents and families the freedom to choose the method of education that will work best for their children ... regarding how and where their children will receive their education, whether in the public system or not," at taxpayer expense, and, thanks to a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that if a state chooses to provide taxpayer money for private schooling it must also provide funds for religious schooling, again violating the Idaho Constitution.

"Neither the legislature nor any county, city, town, township, school district, or other public corporation, shall ever make any appropriation, or pay from any public fund or moneys whatever, anything in aid of any church or sectarian or religious society, or for any sectarian or religious purpose, or to help support or sustain any school, academy, seminary, college, university or other literary or scientific institution, controlled by any church, sectarian or religious denomination whatsoever," Title IX, Section 5 reads. "Neither the legislature nor any county, city, town, township, school district, or other public corporation, shall ever make any appropriation, or pay from any public fund or moneys whatever, anything in aid of any church or sectarian or religious society, or for any sectarian or religious purpose, or to help support or sustain any school, academy, seminary, college, university or other literary or scientific institution, controlled by any church, sectarian or religious denomination whatsoever; nor shall any grant or donation of land, money or other personal property ever be made by the state, or any such public corporation, to any church or for any sectarian or religious purpose."

Such a measure would not only drain scant education funds away from the free public schools demanded by the state constitution, those parents who would exercise that choice, taking their kids out of public schools, would be far less likely to vote in favor of public school funding.

If passed, House Bill 58 would cut in half opportunities for Idahoans to vote on school funding measures, further exacerbating the ability of Idaho school districts to keep their schools afloat.

Public education is a parental choice demanded by the Idaho Constitution. Public schools are made possible by the investment of taxpayers as established by law to serve the public good, not the individual parent, though parents of public school students have rights to make their voices heard. They are encouraged to attend parent teacher conferences, to assist in their children's classrooms, to attend and participate in school board meetings, to contact their legislators if concerns aren't met at the local level.

Parents have the right not to send their children to public schools, but the state has no obligation to burden its taxpayers with paying for any other choice than public school.

While some of the legislative proposals regarding education may well be sound, perhaps even beneficial, the Idaho legislature should be focused first on enacting legislation to come at long last into compliance with the mandate set forth in Title IX, Section 1. Only then should legislators feel free to put the imprints of their own personal ideas and biases on Idaho public education.