KID MATTERS

Wyoming School District Can’t Spend Education Money Fast Enough

By Headwaters News, 5-09-06

A little-known, and until a few years ago, unused provision of the Wyoming Constitution, mandates that when school districts that receive more in revenue from a special property tax for education than they’re entitled to under state law, the state "recaptures" up to 75 percent of the excess for redistribution to other districts. The rest of the excess money is rebated to the district that originally collected the tax.

This year, the Associated Press reports in the Casper Star-Tribune, that constitutional provision will send $51. 4 million back to five wealthy school districts in Pinedale, Gillette, Big Piney, Shoshoni and Fremont counties.

That amount is more than double the figure Wyoming returned to Sublette and Campbell counties last year, where booming natural gas revenues set up the need for the state to return excess funding.

The first year the rebate function was ever mandated for use was 2002-2003, but since then the state has returned a total of $90.64 million to the five wealthy districts.

In Pinedale, school officials are considering contributing some of their excess proceeds to other districts as they have literally run out of projects to fund.

That district received $14. 2 million last year and was forecast to receive $25.1 million in recapture funds this year. Those recapture funds have been used to build a $17.2 million swimming complex and to purchase laptops for every fifth-grader in the district.

Yet, despite the disparity in education funding this constitutional mandate creates, school officials in both the state’s wealthiest and poorest districts are opposed to a proposed constitutional amendment that would eliminate the provision.

The sticking point is where the excess revenues would flow should the rebate provision be eliminated. District officials said there appears to be no guarantee that the revenues would stay in school funds. They said they would support a provision that specifically directed excess funding to schools.

Mike O'Donnell, the state's school finance litigation chief, says he believes the constitutional amendment that will go before Wyoming voters this fall will pass where previous, similar ones have failed, simply because it’s more clearly worded, in that it eliminates the rebate provision.

Should that constitutional amendment pass, lawmakers should have little problem finding a place to spend some of the excess cash, as a Wyoming Tribune Eagle story pointed out one area that needs funding: child care for preschool children.

The Casper Star-Tribune reprinted the Tribune Eagle’s story on the high price of child care in the Cowboy State.

As the need for child care has increased across the state, the number of providers have been going down, driving up prices.

That report said the average cost of caring for one preschool-age child for one year is $5,438, an amount that exceeded the cost of one year’s in-state tuition paid by college students in 42 states, including Wyoming.

Wyoming lawmakers did pass one law this past session to improve both the quality and the quantity of child care in the state.

They approved $1.4 million to create a task force to create standards for child care in the state. If the task force’s regulations are approved by the Legislature next year, the system could include a rating system for providers and incentive payments for high-quality, private child-care providers.

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