The Thinker has been very distracted lately and now on another road trip collecting photos and new insight, but couldn’t resist a quick and dirty comment on a Tulsa World Editorial: “Proposed constitutional amendment would let schools pay teachers instead of buying buildings. It offers school districts greater flexibility” appearing Saturday, March 17, 2018. It was about Senate Joint Resolution 70 from Sen. Stephanie Bice, R-Oklahoma City. Senator Bice is my favorite state senator because she ID’d my thinker photo of the Carousel in Elk City, Oklahoma I used for my post “Same Song, Umpteenth Verse ”. My favorite senator used to be my own when she was Penny Williams and later Tom Adelson, but now my senator is Gary Stanislawski who is a nice man who cares little about government efficiency (witness his give-away to virtual charter schools) and has dutifully followed the “cutting taxes increases revenue” script that has decimated our state’s capacity to provide essential services.
So I’d love it if Senator Bice’s SJR 70 actually was a helpful piece of legislation, but it is not. If it makes it to the ballot, fine if it passes, but it will be a hollow “victory” for anyone who really wants to make a difference for our state’s teachers. Here is why.
Look at the recent Oklahoma Cost Accounting System (OCAS) reports for Oklahoma school districts. https://sdeweb01.sde.ok.gov/OCAS_Reporting/StateReports.aspx The most recent showing is for FY 2016-2017 but the State Department of Education has posted incomplete reports because the statewide total shows Function 4000 at $0.00 for each and every fund, meaning no district statewide in FY 2017 spent a single dollar on construction or acquisition of facilities. I know for a fact that at least one district did. By contrast in FY 2016 the amount for Function 4000 total expenditures statewide is about $560 million. So, quite simply, the SDE inexplicably failed to include Function 4000 totals in their posting of FY 2017 OCAS data.
Looking, then, instead at the last credible year of OCAS data, namely FY 2016, we see that statewide totals for the Building Fund 21 are $186.8 million. Of that total only $36.9 million is for Function 4000 expenditures which is essentially the only Building Fund use for which school districts cannot also use their General Fund 11. For that same year $421.2 million was expended statewide from school districts General Funds for Function 2600 purposes, virtually all of which are eligible expenditures with Building Fund moneys.
Teacher salaries, and hence pay raises, are almost exclusively funded with school districts’ general funds 11, the main exception being Co-Op funds 12. So it is true the Building Fund 21 cannot be used for teacher compensation. But if you follow the math above you can see that school districts, with possibly a few exceptions—and I mean very few, already have the ability to shift money between the two. For example, if the statewide amounts were one district then that district could simply shift $186.8 million of its Function 2600 General Fund expenditures (remember there is over $400 million) to its Building Fund and use those freed up funds for teacher pay raises. Woopee!
But, what about the approximately $150 million that the school districts’ Building Funds already expend for purposes, like custodians and utilities, for which the General Fund also is being used. If school districts are to use that $150 million for teacher compensation, then how is that $150 million of necessary expenditures going to be covered? The only realistic source is the general fund, but I think you see we’re just re-arranging chairs on the deck of the Titanic.
Translated, there are very few, if any school districts that don’t already have this flexibility, meaning they are paying for custodians, utilities and/or property insurance with general fund moneys that could be freed up by shifting those expenses to their general fund. Presto, they have more general fund money for teacher compensation—except, how then to pay for the building fund expenditures that were then displaced?
The exception might be to find a school district that expends close to nothing out of its general fund 11 for Function 2600 purposes and a significant part of its building fund 21 for Function 4000 purposes for which its general fund cannot be used. Perhaps such districts exist, but I suspect, and may take the time to show, that they are very few. Whoever pitched this to Senator Bice is either unaware of the options available to school districts already, or is a very, very rare bird/district.
We don’t need SJR 70 which will do little if anything for our teachers; we do need a vote to get rid of the 75% requirement that has prevented the majority of our legislators from doing their job.
As always lunch is on me for the first to ID the photo location.
