New County Mayor Jim Coppinger has focused mainly on public education and county schools in his "county conversations" - the meetings he has been holding in each of the County Commission's nine districts since his selection as the county's top official. At his meeting Monday night in District 4 at the Chattanooga School for Arts and Sciences, he said again that education is one of his biggest concerns, and that he has found that county residents seem to think the same way.
He went on to tell his audience that unmet funding needs for classrooms and new school buildings are of deep concern to him and county commissioners, and that "there's nothing we do in Hamilton County with your tax dollars that's more important than education." And, then, of course, he said that "we" - we're not sure if he meant county government or the county's independently elected school board - can address school needs by finding new ways to free up funds, such as cutting cafeteria and transportation staff, as if it's that simple, and as if such cuts would be sufficient to meet the needs and would not diminish important services.
"We can do it, and hopefully we can do it in a way that's not going to require any additional property taxes, but we need to look at some creative ways to do that over the years."
Coppinger may make a good county mayor, and we wish him well in that endeavor. But his statements suggesting the sufficiency of such tinkering, and his blending of the separate functions of county government and the elected school board as if they are one and the same, are among the most disingenuous we've heard in a long time.
They flagrantly confuse the critical issue of the county government's overall budget-making authority for county government with the independent school board's distinct, legal responsibility to fix the details of the school board's budget and policies.
They blur the otherwise sharp differences that now exist between the two bodies over funding. They ignore the County Commission's withholding of some $6 million in PILOT funds from the school board, where that money properly belongs. And they ignore the divisive, legal dispute over the commission's desire to use the PILOT funds to finance bonds to build six new schools, versus the elected school board's desire and authority to use those funds to help close a $7 million shortfall in the new system's operating budget for the new school year.
The school board's serious budget shortfall and related issue cannot be fixed by such airy, dismissive talk, and it's a disservice to the mayor's constituents to suggest that they can.
In fact, the County Commission has done relatively little over the past 12 years to boost funding for the school system's operating budget against general inflation and against excessive increases in text-books, technology improvements, health care and other portions of the school system's budget.
Just part of a roughly 60 cent tax increase in 1999 went to the school system. The commission subsequently denied a well-documented increase of just over 50 cents sought by former Mayor Claude Ramsey in 2004 after an intensive, yearlong school-summit campaign. It allowed a modest 26-cent increase, instead, in 2005, and another 26-cent increase in 2007.
In roughly that same period, enrollment in the county system (in consistent 20th day enrollment figures) gradually fell from a high of 43,559 in the 1997-98 school year, to a low of 40,016 in the 2002-03 year, and has since risen again to a high, in the current year, of 41,950. The increase, school officials say, has been mainly in elementary grades.
The County Commission's perceived need for six new schools focuses mainly on growth in the suburbs, largely in the east Hamilton County area from Tyner to East Brainerd to Apison. But it is arrogant and wrong for the commission to assume or usurp authority for a school building policy. That responsibility rightly belongs to the school board. And given its operating budget shortfall, it may well be better for the school board to reconfigure zoning policies to make better use of existing buildings than to build so many new schools while money for teachers and programs lags.
Mayor Coppinger would best serve the school system by persuading the County Commission to restore the PILOT funds - payments in lieu of school taxes made by Volkswagen and its supplier plants - to the school system's budget. He is, after all, not about to suggest a tax increase for schools, nor will cafeteria and transportation cuts come close to filling the school system's budget shortfall. If Coppinger is truly serious about providing uniform quality education in Hamilton County schools - a goal which, contrary to his pleasant assumptions, remains formidable and unattained - he will take serious measures. The time to do so is already fading.