Facts About Funding
How much does a school system need to do a great job providing opportunities for all our kids? That is a
very difficult question and I’m sure there are a wide variety of answers crossing thousands of minds as
this is being read. Part of your thought process depends on whether or not you have kids in the schools,
if you ever had kids in public schools, how you liked school yourself, and even your own level of
education and employment. If you don’t have kids in school and don’t otherwise see value in assisting
in the education of other people’s children, any amount might be too much. If you are a parent or
grandparent of a student in school, you might think that we are spending far too little. Taken as a
whole, I imagine the consensus opinion is that educating the next generation is a worthy thing to be
doing, but unfortunately, it sure seems like the words “school tax” appears all over the place on all kinds
of bills.
By far, the largest expense is what we pay our teaching staff. This is altogether proper because our
teaching staff is the people that actually educate our children and the rest of us who work for the school
district are hired to support that activity. Our General Fund for this year will be about $85 million, of
which almost $70 million goes to pay the people who work for the school district. Obviously, a large
part of that money circulates through the local and regional economy in the form of buying houses, cars,
groceries and other things. That leaves about $15 million for everything else. Everything else includes a
lot of fixed costs, such as around $3 million for utility bills (on which, oddly enough, we have to pay
school tax), $750,000 for property and bus insurance, $1 million for diesel fuel, $1.7 million for facility
maintenance, $700,000 tax collection fees to the Sheriff’s Department, $600,000 for replacement buses,
and so on, which leaves precious little for instructional materials, technology and supplies.
Some facts not widely known:
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The amount of dollars that BCPS has to spend on each student is 4th from the bottom in the
state.
Our school tax rate is quite a bit lower than Jefferson, Nelson, Shelby or Oldham counties.
If our revenue per student were even at the state average, the budget would grow by almost
20% or $18 million.
Our classroom teachers’ pay ranks 9th from the top in Kentucky. It must to in order to be at all
competitive because JCPS ranks 1st.
Aside from the justification that will probably change few opinions on the matter, I am writing this piece
on this topic to illustrate what I see as severe and growing inequities related to the funding of our state
educational system. It is hard to understand, when BCPS took in $6,337 per student in the General
Fund while one of our neighboring districts almost $3,000 MORE for each kid (translating into roughly
$34 Million when multiplied by our student numbers), how can we expect OUR children to have the
same level of opportunities.
The system we have, where the state legislature makes the rules and mandates and only provides a
portion of the funding leaves locally elected Boards of Education in the very difficult position of cutting
opportunities for their students or raising tax rates. This is unfair to communities like ours and leads to
unhealthy division in communities across the state.
There is a solution. All locally levied school taxes (property and utility) should be eliminated and the
state should fund our schools at an equitable level with necessary adjustments for factors related to
particular needs or regional costs of living. If that were done, our Board of Education could concentrate
– in a completely unified way – on providing the best education possible within the same budgetary
level as every other district in the state. It would be much simpler and much more equitable for the
children of Bullitt County, and the children in many other districts across the state.