The school system budget is back in the School Board’s court after a joint meeting of the county’s Education Committee and Budget and Finance Committee on Tuesday.
County officials opted not to fully fund the school system budget for the second time in two weeks and sent it back to the School Board for cuts. The first time this happened, the School Board voted to return the budget to the county unchanged.
The school system says it’s not asking for any extra money than what it received last year. The county maintains funding the school budget at the same level would require a tax increase since it has devoted so much money to defending a sales tax lawsuit from the city.
The two sides appear at an impasse.
“The county’s got to do this to meet maintenance of effort,” said Director of Schools Dr. Jerry Hale. “This is going to be a rough one and I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Maintenance of effort is a law which requires the county to continue funding the school system at the same level as the previous year. The law is in place to prevent governments from reducing education funding every time there are rocky economic times.
The Tuesday meeting was attended by School Board chairman Bob Young, as well as a number of commissioners who do not serve on either committee.
Budget and Finance Committee chairman Herschel Wells began the meeting by asking if any of the commissioners would be willing to raise taxes, receiving negative replies from all commissioners present.
“We’re trying to see if we’ve got anybody that’ll support raising property tax 6 cents to balance the school budget,” Education Committee chairman Terry Bell said.
Bell pointed out much of the county’s financial woes are due to the cost of defending a lawsuit to recover a portion of the local option sales tax brought by the city, along with the start of payments on money for a new Morrison school.
“We put the $400,000 in there to defend the lawsuit,” Bell said. “And then when we went ahead and did Morrison school, which we’ve got to start making payments on that principle the first of September, which is $48,300 per month, and that will mean 10 months of that. So that’s another $480,000 out of our budget. You’re talking about over $900,000 that we’ve depleted out of budget for two things we’re doing to help our schools.”
“And then they’re coming and asking for another 6 cents to try to make up the budget, and it’s just not there,” Bell continued. “I think you can see the position the commissioners are in. The only thing I know to do as chairman of the Education Committee is entertain a motion that we send it back to see if there’s any way they can help us.
“We’ve really tried to help the schools by appropriating over $16 million in the last year for two school projects that we thought was our main objective. If they can’t help us any, then evidently we needed that money to operate on instead of building schools is the way I look at it,” Bell concluded.
Motions were made by both committees and passed unanimously, sending the school budget back to the School Board for a second time.
“We’re just trying to avoid a 6-cent property tax increase for county taxpayers,” said Wells. “That’s all we’re trying to do.”
The School Board will meet again Thursday, July 28 to go over the budget again. When contacted yesterday, Dr. Hale said he couldn’t predict what the School Board would do, since all it’s asking for is the maintenance of effort required by law.
Hale also noted the Memphis board of education has voted not to start school until the Memphis City Council pays the schools what they were short last year.