FRAUD OF SB 380 SEEN IN FUNDING SHORTFALL

Last year's passage of Senate Bill 380, the school finance reform legislation, was the proudest boast of Gov. Mel Carnahan and legislative leaders. As these leaders spent much of the rest of 1993 congratulating themselves for their courageous action, Missourians were told a story that, to many ears, must have sounded pretty good: SB 380's $315 million in higher taxes, added to another $50 million in state-mandated local property tax increases, had averted a claimed judicial takeover of public schools and solved, at least for the near term, Missouri's school funding crisis. Or so Missouri's taxpayers were told.

Wrong. The "judicial takeover" of an entire state's school system was always a weak canard, as close reading of the subsequent Supreme Court decision in the school case reveals. But even opponents of SB 380 must have thought that this many millions in higher taxes would be enough to satisfy the demands of the public education establishment for more money. After all, this was the first rewrite of the complex school foundation formula in 16 years. This time, the state would get it right. Right?

Wrong again. School superintendents across Missouri are waking up to the fact that the new formula for distributing state funds to local districts is underfunded. They are beginning to ask where all the new money is going. For the second consecutive year of the four-year phase-in of the new formula, it turns out there is a shortfall. In the new formula's first year, local districts were supposed to receive 25 percent of their allotment from the new formula. They received 22 percent. This year, SB 380 called for local districts to receive 50 percent of their allotment from the new formula. Instead, it will be more like 42 percent.

"To me, that's a danger signal," Allan Crader, superintendent of the Republic school system, told the Springfield News-Leader. Republic was one of 89 districts that successfully sued the state, alleging that the old formula was unconstitutional. Crader asks: "Are we going back to the same point we were prior to the old lawsuit?"

The facts are sufficiently grim that even some state education officials are beginning to face them. Vic Slaughter, school finance director for the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, has had some fascinating things to say lately about SB 380's new formula. Slaughter told the Springfield newspaper that he projects state funding for the new formula to fall $102 million short for 1994-95. Further, he expects this trend to continue and even worsen. He said the department's best guess for 1995-96 is for a funding shortfall of between $150 and $200 million.

It is time for a serious investigation and for some real answers to hard questions. When Missourians turn over this rock, they will find that most of the new money -- up to 80 percent of the new funding, in some cases -- went for increases in teachers' salaries. Most Missourians probably didn't know that at the time SB 380 was passed and would have loudly protested if they had.

The incredible story of the funding shortfall sounds as though Missouri is headed for another large tax increase, or even a series of them, as it chases the rainbow of a perpetually underfunded formula whose full promise recedes ever further into the future. Whether or not that is true, one thing is certain: Gov. Carnahan and legislative leaders, indeed all lawmakers who voted for SB 380, have some explaining to do. And Superintendent Crader's haunting question -- "Are we going back to the same point we were prior to the lawsuit?" -- demands an answer.

Dr. Robert Bartman, commissioner of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, has just finished a statewide series of window-dressing meetings, supposedly gathering input from citizens, students and educators about SB 380 and its so-called reforms. When Dr. Bartman was able to stop denouncing Amendment 7, he was all sunshine, full of warm, fuzzy comments about how great SB 380 is. Sooner or later, though, he and other Missouri education leaders will have to start facing facts, in public, and begin to level with a public that doesn't cotton to being lied to.