This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
There's a modern analogy to the old proverb "robbing Peter to pay Paul." It's paying your Visa bill with your Mastercard.
No matter what idiom you use, moving money around is not the same as increasing the amount in the pot. But Sen. Lyle Hillyard, R-Logan, and Rep. Merlynn Newbold, R-South Jordan, convinced the Legislature to do just that. And then to claim they have provided the new money needed to educate an expected influx of more than 14,000 new students in Utah schools next year. That's pure baloney.
The base budget for education passed by the Legislature last week would take $76 million from one education-fund pot, called the flexible allocation WPU (weighted pupil unit) distribution, and use it to fund enrollment growth. The problem with that is that the flexible allocation distribution is money Utah schools are already allotted and are using to help pay for mandatory retirement and Social Security costs.
If the flexible allocation distribution is used to hire teachers or buy supplies for the thousands of new students, then school districts will have to cut their budgets for such programs and services as reading, remedial assistance, busing and school nurses in order to make up the difference.
Sen. Karen Morgan, D-Cottonwood Heights, calls the maneuver "smoke and mirrors," and we agree with her. To claim that this base budget is providing the funds necessary to educate 14,000 new students is the same as a family believing it has plenty of cash for food to feed an additional child, when the money has been taken out of the mortgage fund. Family members might not go hungry, but there's a good chance they could get put out on the street.
State Superintendent Larry Shumway said the budget figures agreed to last week really translate into a reduction of $291 per student. And that's quite a hit to a state education system that already operates on less state money per-student than any other state. Utah is not just at the bottom, below all states and the District of Columbia, it spends far less than the next-lowest state. And the gap grows every year.
Some legislators say the base budget is no more than a starting point and that final figures likely will be much different. Updated revenue numbers could reduce the need for cuts. But so would revenue-enhancing proposals, including one to change income-tax filing deadlines for the self-employed that was endorsed by Gov. Gary Herbert, who also reasonably recommends taking more money from the state Rainy Day Fund to shore up education.
Simply moving money around and failing to fund growth for the third straight year is no budget plan at all. It's a shell game.