Group Proposes Sales Tax Increase to Fund Schools

February 1, 2010

Tom Beebe has an idea for raising $850 million a year for Wisconsin schools, easing property taxes for homeowners and buying som e time to devise a long-term solution to the state’s Byzantine school funding system — raise the state’s 5 percent sales tax by 1 percentage point.

It might not be politically viable. But supporters say at least it’s an idea.

“The conversation has to start somewhere,” said Dan Nerad, Madison School District superintendent. “There needs to be a public policy discussion about important questions around the school funding formula.”

The executive director of the Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools, Beebe is the driving force — literally — behind the “A Penny for Kids” campaign. Since summer, he has logged nearly a thousand miles a month, he said, in a low-key, grass-roots campaign focused mainly in rural areas of the state. An online petition has garnered about 1,760 signatures.

Earlier this month, A Penny for Kids won a symbolic endorsement from the Madison School Board and Madison Teachers Inc., the first school district and teachers union to formally support the idea.

Still, no legislator has stepped forward to author a Penny for Kids bill.

Stark budget realities
Over the summer, state lawmakers cut $147 million from public education funding for 2009-11. That translated to a 15-percent drop in state money for Madison schools — $9.2 million — and other cuts elsewhere.

“Every single one of the school districts I represent has had real challenges this year,” said Rep. Fred Clark, D-Baraboo, whose legislative district is one of those targeted by Beebe’s A Penny for Kids campaign. “Montello and Westfield school districts are planning for a consolidation, and that’s directly as a result of their fiscal situations. The Baraboo, Portage and Pardeeville school districts have all had to make significant cuts to their programs — and nobody wants to see that.

&#x 0A;

“I don’t know a single legislator who wouldn’t love to be able to provide more resources for schools right now, especially given the current budget crisis and the cuts to education funding that we needed to make,” Clark said. “That being said, we have some really difficult fiscal realities in the state right now, and I just don’t think it’s going to be possible this session to find significant new revenue for schools.”

But Julie Underwood, dean of the UW-Madison School of Education, said using the recession to put off questions about school funding “is not very useful.”

“Something needs to be done,” said Underwood, also a member of the School Finance Network, a coalition of educators, school boards and advocacy groups that has put forth a school funding reform plan separate from Beebe’s sales tax campaign. “Just trying to tinker with property tax hasn’t gotten us very far. The education of each child in our state affects the entire state, so we should have a system where each child is actually supported by the state, not just the property owners in their town.”

A Penny for Kids is not meant to be a long-term solution, Beebe said, adding it’s meant to “plug that gaping hole in the dike.”

The campaign has been intentionally low-key, focusing on small communities that can lobby their legislators from the ground up, he said.

“I know it’s a bad time,” Beebe said. “I know we’re in an economic slump. I know it isn’t politically popular to recommend we raise any taxes. However, if we’re going to push education into the 21st century, we’re going to have to make that investment and the best way right now to do that is with the sales tax.”

Unpopular proposal
But the plan has little political chance, and without changes to the school funding formula, could have a downside for public school districts such as Madison’s, said Todd Berry, president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.

“This is where the politics get really messy,” Berry said. “If you take sales tax money and put it in the school aid formula, what you will find when you just let the computers run are some areas of the state that will send in more sales tax to (the capital) than they’ll get back in school aid. Madison would be an absolute case study of somebody that would probably lose under this, because they are not a heavy recipient of school aid and they are a retail center.”

Yet Madison School Board member Beth Moss defends A Penny for Kids as a way to get people talking about money and schools. Legislators have asked the public to “come up with revenue,” she said.

“So here we are — we’re coming up with revenue,” Moss said. “If they’re going to reject ideas flat-out without even considering them, then they have to stop asking those kinds of questions.”