The math of education
Hamilton County is hoping to persuade Tennessee officials to fully fund the state's share of public education financing called the Basic Education Program, or BEP.
That would mean adding about $12 million to the roughly $133 million the state has been contributing locally to the county school system's $393 million operating budget.
So if you're looking at these numbers, you're seeing that state pays about a third of our children's education. If they bump that $133 million up to $145 million -- which would fully fund the BEP in Hamilton County -- the state would still be contributing only about 36 percent of the cost of educating our children.
We pay nearly 60 percent of the state's revenue with our sales taxes. And we fund the lion's share or the remaining cost of our kids' education with our Hamilton County property tax.
But that's not all that's wrong with the state's math on K-12 education.
The BEP funding formula is a "weighted average" intended to help balance out the variations of teacher salary from county to county and keep poor counties from being penalized further by their poorness. But it begins with a false mathematical assumption.
It uses an average teacher salary of $40,447 when the actual average is $50,116. Just on the salaries question alone, BEP starts the calculations with a 23.9 percent gap in reality, according to the 2014 BEP Review Committee Annual Report released in November.
Times Free Press Reporter Tim Omarzu in Monday's paper quoted House Majority Leader Gerald McCormick, R-Chattanooga, saying that fully funding BEP would cost about $515 million (more) a year and require either tax increases or cuts to existing programs. "But the money's not there," McCormick said.
Funny, that didn't stop our lawmakers from getting a raise this year.
Earlier this month, the Knoxville News Sentinel reported that our part-time legislators' base pay would increase to $20,884 under a state law that ties their salaries to state employee compensation over the last two years. Some state workers did receive a 2013 raise, and that's what bumped lawmakers up this year by nearly $700. Members of the state House and Senate also now will receive $198 in daily lodging and dining allowances for up to 90 legislative days and 15 organizational days in a two-year term.
It's all about priorities, and we need to set some new ones for our lawmakers, as well as our students.
Watching the population clock
The U.S. Census Bureau this week projected the United States population will be 320,090,857 on Jan. 1, 2015. If you get lost on all those digits and commas, that's a bit over 320 million.
The number represents an increase of 2.3 million people, -- a 0.73 percent jump -- from New Year's Day 2014, and 11.3 million, or 3.67 percent increase, since Census Day on April 1, 2010.
If you'd like to put this into context with time, Census Bureau officials say that in January 2015, the U.S. is expected to experience a birth every eight seconds and a death every 12 seconds. Meanwhile, net international migration is expected to add one person to the U.S. population every 33 seconds.
All in all, the births, deaths and net international migration increases the U.S. population by one person every 16 seconds.
The South is the nation's most populous region, and Georgia is the eighth most populous state. (Remember that the next time you complain about traffic to and from Atlanta and some smartie pants from the Northeast tells you that you don't know what traffic is.)
But our growth is relative: The projected world population on Jan. 1 is 7,214,958,996 (7.2 billion with a B), an increase of just over 77.3 million, or 1.08 percent, from New Year's Day 2014. During January 2015, 4.3 births and 1.8 deaths are expected worldwide every second.
And the world is getting smaller all the time.