A Model for Sustainable School Funding

Encampment, WY is home to 450 people and a high school with maybe a dozen graduates each year.

It is a genuinely "local" school in every sense of the word.

Except funding.

If the Encampment school needs maintenance, the money comes from a fund built by one-time fees on new coal leases. The number of leases sold, in turn, depends mostly on demand for coal in the United States, but also in far-distant economies like China. If car production in Michigan slows down or there is a real-estate crisis in the Chinese economy, students in Encampment will have to wait longer for repairs and renovations of their athletics facility, their science lab or their cafeteria.

So far, this funding model has worked. The slowly emerging recession in China has not yet spilled over into Wyoming. But while we wait for that to happen, another distant player is affecting Wyoming school maintenance funding. According to the Casper Star Tribune, major uncertainty about regulations and other federal incursions into the free market...

resulted in no new coal leases in Wyoming in 2013. As a result, the state's latest fiscal profile shows coal lease bonus revenue dwindling to zero by 2018.

Again: last year, the Tribune explains, not a single application came in for coal mining rights on federal land in Wyoming.

Needless to say, those who created the current school building fund never foresaw this scenario. Naturally, there is now a looming panic among state legislators. Their immediate concern is a patchwork solution using state savings accounts, but the big question is what a new funding model will look like.

Here is a thought. Instead of remaining dependent on the Chinese business cycle or the regulatory whims of federal bureaucrats, how about localizing school maintenance and construction?

Wyoming abandoned its local-funding model after decisions in the state supreme court. But the only way to secure predictable, sustainable funding for local schools is to tie the school maintenance need to the local ability to pay for it.

Unrealistic? Consider these numbers. The school facilities fund will spend $227 million in 2014. That equals 1.4 percent of total household income in Wyoming. For Carbon County, where Encampment is, a 1.4-percent local school maintenance tax would yield $5.9 million per year.

Instead of relying on the unsustainable, our state lawmakers should focus their efforts on removing the constitutional hurdles to a workable, reliable local school funding model.

Constitutions can be changed; the laws of economics cannot.