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by Joe Sullivan

County Mayor Mike Ragsdale deserves plaudits for his many progressive budget recommendations. His plans for a new downtown library, a new Discovery Center, new senior centers in Halls and South Knoxville and upgrading of the Beck Cultural Center are all laudable. So is his recommended $30 increase in Knox County’s wheel tax to pay for these and other initiatives.

That makes it all the harder to fathom how a man who has been so progressive on so many counts could be so stingy where public school funding is concerned. Exclusive of schools, Ragsdale’s budget that County Commission approved last week provided a 5.7 percent increase in county outlays to cover everything from his initiatives to a three percent pay raise for county employees (exclusive of teachers).

For schools, however, the county mayor spurned the school board’s request for a comparable increase in its budget to $316.3 million. Instead, he only provided for an increase from $299 million to $305.5 million—less than half as much in percentage terms as the rest of the county government.

This comes at a time when the school system’s needs for additional funding are in many ways the most pressing of any facing the county. For starters, the school system must come up with $13.2 million just to meet obligatory cost increases. These include: $4.1 million for the local share of a two percent pay raise mandated by the state Legislature; $1.9 million more for health insurance; $1.9 million in added textbook costs; $1.3 million more in debt service on already committed school construction projects; $1.1 million for 25 additional teacher positions needed to satisfy state teacher-pupil ratio requirements; and a $3 million mandatory increase in contributions to the state retirement system in which teachers participate. The latter, in particular, is purely a school system cost increase since the county doesn’t have a pension fund with defined benefits.

On top of that, the school board recommended an additional 1.25 percent pay raise at a cost of $3.9 million in an attempt to narrow the gap between Knox County teacher salaries that average $38,300 and the $41,200 average at school systems in six surrounding counties. Equally pressing is the need for more funding for capital expenditures. The county’s single highest priority right now is building a new high school in West Knox County, not just to relieve horrific overcrowding at Farragut High School, but also oversizing at Bearden High School and prospectively Karns High School. But Ragsdale and County Commission have also spurned the school board’s request that $3.2 million of the $12 million raised by the wheel tax increase be dedicated to debt service to finance the $40 million cost of a new high school. Even before undertaking this project, the school system is faced with having to dip ever deeper into its operating funds to cover debt service on other school construction projects that Ragsdale has declared imperative. Yet the county mayor has not seen fit to provide the school system with any new sources of debt service revenue.

Cutting $10 million out of its requested operating budget is Ragsdale’s prescription for how the school board should make ends meet. He claims school board Chairman Sam Anderson privately agreed to such a cut, but Anderson has denied such an agreement. The school board just went through a $10 million cost cutting exercise a year ago when Ragsdale subjected schools to a comparable budget whack. About a million dollars each came out of student transportation, school maintenance, special education, technology, the school system’s central office and textbook purchases among other cuts. Classroom instruction was largely spared from those cuts- but won’t be if there’s another round of them. “It will mean severe cuts in programs, and advanced placement programs will be the first to go because they’re not mandatory,” Anderson laments.

Along with lagging teacher pay, per-student expenditures by Knox County schools are already well below the surrounding county average, let alone the other metropolitan areas of the state. In 2003, Knox County spent $6,567 per student compared to a $6,970 average at schools in the six surrounding counties, $7,229 in Hamilton County and $8,095 in Davidson County.

It’s true that Ragsdale has set in motion a heralded Every School a Great School initiative that will add $6.8 million to school funding beginning in 2005-06. But this money will be dispersed through a foundation primarily to meet the special needs of unprepared and underperforming youngsters and to reward teachers for performance gains in the center city schools that harbor most of them. This, too, is laudable, but it will make a mockery of Great Schools if the rest of the student population is left to suffer.

County officials have been contradictory at best about where the $12 million raised by the wheel tax increase will go. County commissioners were furnished a schedule that purports to show $3 million going to schools, along with $2.5 million to the sheriff’s department, $2.3 million for grants to non-profit entities, $1.9 million toward other employee pay raises, $611,000 for debt service, and the list goes on. However, when asked whether the $3 million for schools is in addition to the $305.5 provided in Ragsdale’s budget, the county’s finance director, John Werner, says, “No, it’s included in the $305.5.”

The budget itself paints a very different picture of where the $12 million would go. It allocates $2.8 million of the wheel tax increase to the county’s general fund in a way that would indirectly benefit schools, $1.2 million for libraries, $3.8 million for debt service (excluding schools), and no new money for schools per se. That totals $7.8 million which leaves $4.2 million of the proceeds unaccounted for. In other words, they are hidden from public view.

Needless to say, such now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t, phony baloney accounting flunks the truth in budgeting test. But the county administration can make amends by allocating the missing money to schools.

June 3, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 23 © 2004 Metro Pulse