Rural school funding axed in School Finance Act deal

A handful of rural school districts in Colorado will shoulder $7 million in budget cuts on their own, the result of a fraught compromise adopted Tuesday by the bipartisan sponsors of the annual School Finance Act in both the Senate and then the House.

The deal struck will hit 10 small, impoverished rural school districts the hardest. Seven of the 10 are on the Eastern Plains. All 10 face a decline in property-tax revenues from the dwindling energy and mining industries. To survive, the districts turned to the state for funding, most of them for the first time. They hoped to tap into $1 million in grants from a state Department of Education contingency fund to help make up for the millions they will be losing.

The School Finance Act sponsors, four of the six lawmakers on the Joint Budget Committee, promise to allow the $1 million to be distributed through grants to six of the 10 districts. Each district would be eligible to receive a maximum of 25 percent of the cuts they face.

Four districts weren't eligible because they had either taken state grants to cover budget cuts in the past or had relied on state funding for their schools through the School Finance Act.

Kirk Bangert, president of the Rural Schools Alliance, criticized the decision to eliminate relief for two of the state's smallest rural school districts, in Cripple Creek and Pawnee.

Said Bangert, “the JBC has made the decision to ignore the problems facing these districts and to severely scale back relief provided to the other locally funded districts.”

“Pawnee and Cripple Creek will now be forced to take an immediate 12 percent cut to their budget. With this cut, school children in Cripple Creek and Pawnee, as well as the other districts impacted by this decision, will be without their valuable teachers, and the JBC will have to explain to these school children and their parents why.”

In additional to Cripple Creek, which will tackle a $431,0000 shortfall on its own, Fort Lupton will shoulder $2 million, the Pawnee School District $164,000, and Briggsdale $273,000 in cuts.

 

Photo credit: Ali Em, Creative Commons, Flickr.