By Jared Stranberg
Across the nation, budget cuts and teacher layoffs have been impacting public schools, leaving the students with potentially less opportunities and less preparation for their future.
In the spring of 2018, several thousand Colorado school teachers went on strike, demanding school funding at the steps of their state capitol. Teachers in Arizona, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Kentucky followed suit, sharing the same frustration as the Colorado teachers. Even here in Nebraska, Omaha Public Schools cut $26.1 million from their planned 2019 budget.
These cuts aren’t new either. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, schools from 29 states saw less state funding after the recession hit in 2009, with 17 of them seeing over a 10% decrease.
The president of the Nebraska State Educators Association, Jenni Benson, said Nebraska ranks around 47th in the nation regarding state funding for schools, leading to some of the highest property taxes in the nation. Additionally, Benson said that out of the 240 school districts in the state, roughly 170 of them do not receive any equalization aid (a large portion of total state aid) because of Nebraska’s school funding formula.
Benson added that the NSEA is working with the state government to stabilize the “three-legged stool” of school funding.
“So, you have sales tax, you have income tax and you have property tax,” Benson said. “And each one of those tax bases then provides revenue for certain things. Property tax is one of those things that the leg is way off, we’re heavily reliant upon property tax to fund our public schools.”
Putting so much weight on property tax presents a problem for smaller school districts. Smaller district size leads to less funding, which reduces a school’s budget even more. Benson said that despite the lack of resources in some schools, Nebraska still provides quality education, ranking in the top three for graduation rates in the nation.
“However, as the saying goes ‘death by a thousand cuts,’” Benson said. “You know, the little tiny cuts in budgets start to then become big issues.”
Trenton Bates, a sophomore at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, has seen how funding can affect public schools firsthand. When he met students from other, larger schools, he found that compared to his hometown of Beatrice, other schools had far more opportunities for college preparation.
“It sucks that we weren’t offered more college dual credit in high school because we weren’t a big school,” Bates said.
Bates is studying computer science and security at UNO. However, the high school he came from did not offer much for information technology.
“If I had the opportunity to take more IT classes in Beatrice,” Bates said, “I feel like it would’ve benefitted me more in classes here at Omaha.”
Eventually, Nebraska may find a way to equalize funding for public schools to properly prepare their students for the future. After all, Benson said that the future of these students is the future of the state.
“Ultimately, when we’re investing in our public schools and we’re investing in our students, we’re investing in the future of Nebraska,” Benson said. “We want those students to stay here and be contributing members to Nebraska as well.”
