Dennis Carnahan is one frustrated man, annoyed at what he sees as the state's doublespeak when it comes to financially rewarding those school corporations that have done what they were told to do only to be literally shortchanged in their support from the state.
“I just don't understand,” said Carnahan, a veteran member of the South Knox school board, at Monday night's meeting.
Superintendent Tim Grove had just completed a financial report that showed the school corporation could be facing a $500,000 budget deficit next year — this even though enrollment has been increasing, test scores rising, and spending going down.
“But instead of our being rewarded for doing that, we're getting even less (state) money,” Carnahan said. “There's a disconnect there that I just don't get.”
Back when former governor Mitch Daniels and his supporters in the Legislature pushed through a series of "reforms" that basically adapted Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest to public education, there was the promise that "money would follow the child," meaning that growing enrollment would draw more state funding.
Apparently, fulfilling that promise proved too difficult, and corporations like South Knox, despite their increased number of students, didn't get the additional funding.
Later would come Mr. Daniels' efforts at "tax reform," which replaced local property taxes with state sales tax revenues as the source of money for school General Funds, and we've seen how well that's worked out over the years, what with layoffs, the elimination of programs and more fees assessed parents so their children can participate in extracurricular activities.
Before all these changes of recent years South Knox, like other county schools, was among those corporations in the bottom tier of state support per student, some years at or very near the bottom.
In those days, corporations were able to supplement that funding shortfall with local property tax revenue.
Recall that those tax rates were voted on by locally-elected board members, many of whom were also some of the largest property owners in their school districts, men and women who were anything but frivolous in how they spent their own money and equally conservative in their attitudes toward paying taxes.
You could make the argument that, before the changes of the Daniels' era, school board members too often erred on the side of collecting too little in property-tax revenue, often being slow to invest in new technology.
Now we have the tax caps, charter schools and vouchers taking money away from public education, and tax revenue that was promised for schools that's instead spent elsewhere to fill holes in the budget.
Yet the state provides huge tax cuts for corporations, feeding an insatiable appetite for what amounts to subsidizing private property with public money.
And public education, across the state, suffers.
“You can't expect to feed a growing family with the same size pie,” Grove said Monday. “I agree that more money can't solve everything, but I also know that having less money isn't going to solve anything.”