This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Eight years ago the Republican leaders of the Utah House and Senate ventured down from Capitol Hill to meet with the editorial board of The Salt Lake Tribune to talk about the 2004 legislative session that was scheduled to commence a few days later.
The Tribune had a new executive editor who came from out of state and wanted to sit in on the meeting to get a feel for the Legislature in Utah. Several other editors sat in, as well as two political reporters looking for a story from the discussions. I sat in, too, hoping to get information for my column.
There was a number of Republican legislators on one end of a long table in The Tribune's conference room equal to the number of journalists on the other side.
It quickly became evident to me that the politicians at one end of the room and the journalists at the other spoke in different languages. It was like the land of Zork having a pow-wow with the land of Grock, with no translator.
As the lawmakers gave their reasons why Utahns should not worry about the level of funding for the bulging public schools in our state, the journalists looked more and more confused.
Then-Senate President Al Mansell smiled broadly and proudly proclaimed that the problem was solved. Utah was projected to have 145,000 more students in 10 years, with a slightly declining birth rate. That, of course, meant that those additional students would come with additional parents, which meant more taxpayers. So the broadened tax base would flood state coffers with more money to more than compensate for the additional students, and everything in the world of education would be blissful.
That, of course, meant we didn't have to worry about burdening the taxpayer with additional education funding now because it would all be taken care of naturally within the next decade.
All of Mansell's companions on the legislators' side of the room smiled knowingly. They all agreed. Problem solved.
Those of us on the journalist side of the room had an expression that seemed to resemble that of Dorothy when her house landed on the Wicked Witch of the East.
It made no sense to us.
We tried to ask about the students currently in the schools. But we got little response, other than the smug smiles from the lawmakers so proud of their genius.
The meeting inspired a Tribune editorial at the time that basically chastised the legislators for the creative excuses they always come up with to justify not adequately funding education.
It's not 10 years later, but close enough. Eight years after Mansell's confident prediction, the prognosis that drove the agenda in the 2004 legislative session has turned out to be wrong.
It's true that Utah's population has increased by about a half million since the last census in 2000. But 70 percent of that, according to the Census Bureau, is a result of Utah's high birth rate. So while about 150,000 came from families moving into the state, including their children, most of it is a population that will continue to burden the school system.
And while jobs have increased by 200,000 since 2003 and public school enrollment has jumped by about 50,000, Utah remains dead last in per-pupil funding and highest in the nation in average class size. The per-pupil funding, using the WPU formula, is actually slightly less than it was in 2003. That might explain why test scores are going down and high school graduates are showing they are not ready for college.
Yet, with the new legislative session set to begin on Monday, I have no doubt there will be optimism about how well we are doing for our students here in the Beehive State, at least in the language of legislative-speak. —