THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, July 20, 1994 TAG: 9407200425
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY BETTY MITCHELL GRAY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RALEIGH LENGTH: Long : 107 lines
When state lawmakers completed their budget last weekend, they included a windfall for schools in northeastern North Carolina.
Seventeen districts are slated to receive more than $4.8 million in funds through the Basic Education Plan and through supplemental funds for small and low-wealth schools approved by the General Assembly.
But legislators, who believe that the state has been unable to find the perfect system for funding the state's public schools, have authorized a study this year of public school financing.
When state lawmakers approved the state budget early Sunday, they allocated $7 million to the state's poor school systems and $3 million to the state's small school systems. Of this, $913,848 will be allocated to the area's 14 low-wealth school districts and $2,537,445 for the 11 small school districts in the area.
Besides the supplemental funds, the area's 17 school districts are scheduled to receive $2,323,061 out of $46.6 million in Basic Education Program money for teachers and teaching assistants to reduce kindergarten class size, instructional support programs and textbooks.
This year's big winner in the funding game is Bertie County, which was added this year to the list of those eligible for small-school funding. Bertie County schools are to receive $716,230 in supplemental funding and $154,894 in BEP money.
``We were hoping that we would get the funding,'' said Earnest Howard, finance officer for Bertie County Schools, where small-school and low-wealth funding will add about 50 percent to the $1.5 million in local money for the district's current expense budget.
``Education of our students is our top priority,'' Howard said. ``We definitely need the money for teachers, teacher's assistants and supplies.''
State lawmakers about 6 years ago approved the Basic Education Program as a means of providing money for a standard curriculum for all school districts in the state.
But critics of the plan, such as Senate leader Marc Basnight, say the BEP tends to favor the larger, wealthier school districts.
For example, four northeastern North Carolina school districts - Chowan, Hyde, Perquimans and Warren counties - are slated to receive no instructional support funding under the new BEP appropriations, according to the N.C. Department of Public Instruction.
The General Assembly, partly because of funding inequities and partly to fend off lawsuits threatened by the state's smaller and poorer schools, funded a package of special appropriations for those schools for the first time in 1991. Among the 17 northeastern counties, only Dare County is ineligible to receive funding under either program.
``It's just a difference in philosophy between the programs,'' said Basnight in a recent interview in his office in Raleigh.
And in 1993 state lawmakers changed the funding formula for allocations from the fund for poor schools, increasing the number of school systems eligible for appropriations from the fund.
Under the new formula approved by state lawmakers, school systems generally qualify for small school supplements if total enrollment is 3,000 students or fewer. School systems qualify for low-wealth supplements if their tax base per student is below the statewide average, their per capita income is below par and their tax rate is equal to or above state average.
Since 1991, $35 million has been appropriated by the state to its poor school systems and $14 million to its small systems.
About 26 small school systems will receive appropriations this year while 71 poor systems will receive funds, according to the General Assembly's fiscal research division.
But even the supplemental funds fail to help all the school systems that should be eligible.
For example, Hyde County, one of the state's smallest and poorest counties, should qualify for the low-wealth school supplement, lawmakers say. But high property values on Ocracoke Island skew computations of the county's wealth and make it ineligible for money under that supplement.
``There is no formula that we can develop to include Hyde County in that funding,'' Basnight said.
And leaders of some of the state's poor school systems say that the supplemental funding given to them so far represents only a drop in the bucket when compared with the needs of the state's poor schools.
Reports by the American Civil Liberties Union and the N.C. Public School Forum, a group of educators, politicians and business leaders, issued over the last three years show that public schools are increasingly dependent on the wealth of local counties to supplement inadequate state funding.
Poor, rural counties often cannot match funding in larger, wealthier counties even when the local tax rates in these poor counties are well above average.
Various studies have estimated that between $100 and $198 million will be needed for low-wealth schools and $14 million for small-school systems to bring those systems up to par with the larger, wealthier school systems in the state.
Five of the state's poorest school systems earlier this year filed suit against North Carolina based on such inequities in funding. And a group of the state's larger, urban schools have threatened to sue the state to ensure that no money is diverted from their systems to boost the poorer systems in the state.
In response, in part, to that lawsuit and, in part, to growing concerns over the fairness of plans such as the BEP and various supplemental funds, state lawmakers adopted a proposal offered by Sen. Beverly Perdue, D-Craven, calling for a study of public school financing over the next year. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
MONEY TO SCHOOLS
SOURCE: N.C. Department of Public Instruction, Division of School
Business Services, School Budgets Section.
[For complete graphic, please see microfilm]
by CNB