As a matter of fact - can anyone give me some examples of their own town’s, district’s or state’s formulas for education funding? I would love to see some examples to use for comparison or maybe for helping our own district come up with a better method.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with their criteria, and I’m not saying they should only use objective criteria. They shouldn’t - and ability to pay should absolutely play a part in those formulas. But ability to pay is not objective - it’s subjective. You and I could disagree about how much a particular town could afford to pay and for a range of values an outsider could not say one of us was clearly correct and the other is clearly incorrect. Same thing goes for property values (which I assume is what you mean by town valuation ). Just because an assessor assigns my house a particular value doesn’t mean a different assessor wouldn’t assign a higher or lower value- and again, for some range of values, you couldn’t say that one valuation was clearly correct.
When you talk about the affluent town wanting the district to change the formula by imposing a per-pupil cap, and then say
You appear to believe that the affluent town’s “share” is determined by something other than the district’s allocation formula or that the share as determined by the current formula is objectively correct and will remain correct even if the formula is changed.
But if the affluent towns “share” is determined by the allocation formula, then changing the formula would be changing their “share” and the other towns by definition could never be paying a portion of the affluent town’s “share”.
We have an example in our area with a solution.
The Clovis unified School district covers significant portions of the city and county of fresno.
All homes in the clovis unified school district have a property tax amount tacked on as additional funding for the schools regardless of what city you actually live in. If you go to clovis schools, you pay the extra taxes.
This probably won’t help you, but as far as I know in NY state, either an individual city ( NYC, Buffalo, Rochester and a few others) is a district of its own or the school district levies property tax separately from the city, town or county . The situation you describe couldn’t happen in quite that way here.
No - I think we’re talking around each other here - you are right - I am saying that the current formulas being used to determine each town’s share is the “objectively correct” formula only because that is what we have right now. I can’t use any other formula. I’m not saying it’s the best formula - I think many towns in the district wish to change that formula - but how to do it has been very difficult. We are stuck with what we have at the moment.
Having towns come in and propose caps of one sort or another - that end up changing what the allocation formulas have already apportioned can be destructive. I would rather have our district work on the actual formulas and settle on something we can all vote on rather than have towns come in one at a time and attempt to put these bandaids on the budget (by threat of withdrawal from the district). As soon as this richtown issue has been resolved - any other town can come in and propose their own version of a cap which benefits themselves. And here we are back at it again.
This is exactly how it works in NTS. All property owners pay a yearly school tax which is levied by their district.
Honestly, I had no idea it was done differently in other locales.