After nearly eight years in office, Gov. Paul LePage apparently still lacks a fundamental understanding of how Maine’s public schools are funded.
In his weekly radio address released last Friday, LePage lamented the fact that he’ll leave office with a structural budget gap of $504 million. That means, if the state met all of its spending obligations under the law during the next budget cycle, that spending would exceed projected revenues by more than half a billion dollars.
Large structural gaps are common. Earlier in LePage’s administration, soon after a first round of income tax cuts took effect and decreased the amount of available revenue, the state faced a structural gap of $756 million. But the structural gap never became reality as lawmakers adjusted spending and tax levels through the budgeting process to arrive at a balanced budget.
One assumption in that structural gap calculation is that the state will meet its obligation under a 2004 referendum that required the state to fund 55 percent of public K-12 education costs. The state has never met that threshold.
“There’s a major problem with this referendum: The bill never defined what should make up the 55 percent,” LePage said in his radio address. “The language was so loose that 55 percent can never be achieved in a sustainable, ongoing manner.”
The answer to the question, 55 percent of what?, took effect in the 2005-06 school year.
It was Essential Programs and Services, a system for determining what it would cost to provide each student in Maine the education required to meet the Maine Learning Results, the state’s then-newly implemented academic expectations. It determines the basic cost of educating each student, taking into account teacher salaries and benefits, transportation, building maintenance, staff training, and administration. It factors in additional costs for students who require more resources to educate, such as special education students and students from low-income families.
Using Essential Programs and Services, the state determines the total cost of education in each district, based on student enrollment. Put together, Essential Programs and Services determines the total cost of public education for the state.
But LePage might not understand this intricacy.
“[T]he state does not generate the budget based on available resources. Local superintendents each set their own budgets annually,” he continued in his radio address. “In Fiscal Year 2013, this totaled 2 billion, 66 million dollars. The next year the new budget totaled 2 billion, 140 million dollars. The goal posts move each year. And, if you don’t give them all they asked for, they still call it a cut, even when you give them more than you did the year before.”
In fact, the figures LePage cites in that sentence are what Essential Programs and Services determined to be the total cost of an adequate public education in those years. What the state ended up paying was a matter of how much the Legislature and LePage budgeted. In Fiscal Year 2013, the state chipped in $895.1 million — 43 percent of the total cost of education under Essential Programs and Services.
The next year, the total cost rose to $2.14 billion. The share the state contributed rose to $942.3 million.
What it costs to educate kids — the costs of paying their teachers, health insurance, heating a school building and building maintenance — tends to rise each year. Contrary to LePage’s statement, though, what Essential Programs and Services determines to be the cost isn’t the same as the budget.
LePage made another misstatement in his radio address, saying that school superintendents set their districts’ budgets. Those budgets, under state law, have to be approved by local school boards and then, in most cases, by local voters. The superintendent undoubtedly influences the process, but he or she isn’t acting independently to set the school budget.
LePage had eight years to learn these basics. Of course, taking these factors into account would get in the way of his diatribe against school spending.
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