Guest opinion: Real local control requires real resources

Mr. Burnett’s recent guest opinion (Public school advocates are against local school boards, June 28) raises important questions about local control and  public school funding. Unfortunately, it reflects fundamental misunderstandings about both the Coalition of Advocates for Montana’s Public Schools proposal and the constitutional role of Montana’s locally elected boards of trustees. Those misunderstandings deserve clarification. 

Before discussing constitutional principles, let’s begin with what the Coalition actually proposes. It would provide more than $500 million in property tax relief while reducing by roughly half the gap between Montana’s school funding levels and the national average. Even after those investments, Montana would remain more than $300 million below the national average in per-pupil funding and significantly below most neighboring states. 

This is not a proposal to spend without restraint. It is a proposal to provide meaningful tax relief while giving local communities and their elected trustees the resources necessary to build excellent schools. 

The central premise of Mr. Burnett’s argument is that greater state support somehow weakens local control. The opposite is true. 

Montana’s Constitution gives the supervision and control of public schools to locally elected boards of trustees. It also requires the Legislature to provide a basic system of free quality public schools and to equitably fund the state’s share of that system. Those responsibilities are complementary, not competing. The Constitution does not force communities to choose between local control and adequate state support. 

Nothing in the Coalition proposal removes a single decision from local communities or the trustees they elect to represent them. Trustees will continue to establish budgets, hire staff, adopt curriculum, negotiate contracts and work with their communities to determine the educational priorities of their schools. 

What our proposal changes is whether those locally elected trustees have the financial capacity to respond when parents, taxpayers, teachers and community members ask them to preserve valued programs, retain outstanding staff, expand educational opportunities or address emerging local needs. Real local control requires more than the authority to listen and then implement cuts dictated by inadequate state funding. 

True local control requires the ability to act. 

Too often today, school boards are not deciding how best to improve student achievement. Instead, they are deciding which teaching positions to eliminate, which maintenance projects to postpone, whether to increase base teacher salaries at the expense of more senior staff, which academic programs to reduce, or whether to ask homeowners for yet another levy simply to mitigate cuts to existing services. Those are not conversations about educational excellence. They are conversations about scarcity imposed by a funding system that leaves communities and their elected trustees with too few real choices. 

Today’s funding system leaves locally elected trustees holding the bag for decisions they never truly had the resources to avoid. That is not local control. It is local responsibility without an adequate state partnership. 

The Coalition proposal was developed collaboratively by the Montana School Boards Association, the Montana Association of School Business Officials, the Montana Rural Education Association, the Montana Quality Education Coalition, and the School Administrators of Montana. It has been adopted by the Montana School Boards 

Association as our highest legislative priority without a single dissenting vote. Trustees from communities across Montana have reached the same conclusion: the current system no longer provides the resources necessary to fulfill the responsibilities entrusted to them by their voters. 

Mr. Burnett suggests that whoever pays controls the schools. Montana’s Constitution says otherwise. It places supervision and control in locally elected trustees while assigning the Legislature the responsibility to fund the system. Those responsibilities were deliberately separated because the framers understood that adequate state funding and local control are partners, not opponents. 

Local control is not measured by how much property tax homeowners must pay. 

Local control is measured by whether communities and the trustees they elect have the resources to pursue the educational priorities they decide together. 

Shifting an ever-growing share of school funding onto homeowners does not strengthen local governance. It simply transfers the state’s constitutional responsibility onto local taxpayers while forcing communities and their trustees to fight over scarcity instead of building excellence. 

A stronger state partnership does not weaken local control. It strengthens it by giving communities and their elected trustees the capacity to focus on student achievement instead of budget reductions, educational opportunity instead of scarcity, and excellence instead of survival. 

The question before Montana is not whether we believe in local control. The question is whether we believe local communities and the trustees they elect should have both the authority and the resources to build the schools their children deserve. 

That is precisely what the Coalition’s proposal seeks to accomplish.

Rick Cummings, president, Montana School Boards Association, trustee from Cascade; Jenn Hoffman, president-elect, trustee from Billings; and Stephanie Esch, vice president, trustee from Stevensville.