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Are they smarter than 5th graders?
Highland County is preparing to spend as much as $17,500 per student next year to educate children in our one public school division - a figure that sounds closer to college tuition or private school.
Virginia's continuing practice of using a fundamentally flawed formula to decide how much it will contribute to its smallest school remains a serious burden for this county, even more so now that state education spending overall took a serious hit in the last General Assembly session.
Consider this: Highland County's rating for state funding is now very close to that of Fauquier County, one of the state's wealthiest and most populated.
While Highland's rating is up to nearly .64, huge suburban Henrico County stands well below us at .46.
The rating numbers indicate how much school money comes from the state, and how much the localities themselves must contribute. Highland's figure means taxpayers here should cough up 64 percent of the cost of educating our children while Henrico has to come up with only 46 percent.
A county far more similar to ours, southwestern Bland County, is only required to contribute 30 percent. Augusta County, with which Highland is yoked for state dollars, is rated at .33.
Where does this make any kind of sense?
How is it that Virginia's least populated locality, with only one, combined school campus, sits next to Fauquier and Fairfax, where teachers can earn upwards of $50,000 salaries, on the education funding scale?
It's time for Highland to again attempt to get lawmakers to change the state formula.
It's a road we've been down many times before - trying to show them the equation used to determine the amount localities get for education is unfair as applied to Highland County. Past struggles with the General Assembly have had limited success. Once, Highland got a grant to see it through a couple of school budget cycles.
The most important change came a few years ago when legislation was passed to allow our county to use Augusta County's index. This means that for the biggest chunk of state funding, basic aid, Highland can use the lower figure of 33 percent. But the county still has to come up with nearly 65 percent for everything else. It has brought us some relief, but it hasn't solved the problem.
So far, the legislature has not been persuaded to re-think the equation.
We know the arguments by heart: Elected officials in Richmond are unwilling to make any more "concessions" for Highland for fear that other localities will want them, too.
But this formula, the "local composite index of ability to pay," falls apart dramatically when it's applied to Highland.
The equation itself is a complicated assortment of long division problems that consider a county's population, num- ber of students, property values, and sales tax revenue. But as any Highland math student can tell you, when you figure averages, you're supposed to drop the extreme highest and lowest numbers because they can skew the results.
The composite index formula already caps extremes at the high end - no locality contributes more than 80 percent to its schools, even if it can afford to. But on the other end of the scale, there is no cap at the bottom. Because Highland County is well below any other locality in its number of students and overall population, the equation makes it appear that our county has plenty of money to spend on education. And that, as we know, is not the case.
For more than 20 years, county officials here tried to get lawmakers to understand this basic problem, but for nearly that long, assemblymen couldn't findthe will to change the equation, or at minimum, install a bottom cap. Obviously, decision-makers in Richmond didn't learn their mathematics from Highland County teachers. If they had been tested on their logic here, our math teachers would have taken a red pen to their errors and sent them back to the blackboard.
But here we are again, facing the option of losing teachers, programs, or toilet paper and books, and talking about spending 9 percent more per student in just one year.
Highland ought to put all 259 students on a bus, drive to Richmond, and make our legislators tell them why they might not get a math teacher in middle school next year, or an athletic director, or a high school principal.
Maybe Highland should just refuse to meet the mandates Virginia hands down, and set its own standards of learning. If our students can score so well now, in spite of the limited opportunities we can provide, imagine the creative teaching choices that would open up for Highland's kids if Virginia's rules for education didn't apply. Our teachers are smart enough to do a better job, with less money.
The problem with that, of course, is that Virginia ties the hands of local government and the schools would risk losing accreditation, and state dollars, if they chose to ignore the state's requirements.
The best solution is a fair funding formula, and Highland officials need to get back in the lobbying game to get a composite index rating that makes sense. Other answers, like folding Highland's schools into neighboring Augusta's, just don't work logistically.
Something has to give, and it shouldn't be our kids' rights to a great education, our teachers' rights to be paid fairly for providing it, or the basic services our county cannot provide because so much is spent on the schools.
If residents here want to keep the school bells ringing, our officials will need to ring a few bells in Richmond.
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