Guest opinion: STARS Act isn't the problem

The Daily Inter Lake’s editorial, “STARS Act Raises the Floor but Lowers the Ceiling,” correctly recognizes the importance of experienced teachers. Where it misses the mark is in identifying the source of the problem.

The STARS Act did not lower the ceiling. Montana’s school funding system lowered the ceiling years ago.

The STARS Act simply exposed the reality that many districts have been attempting to stretch inadequate resources across competing priorities for far too long.

For decades, Montana has struggled to fund public education at levels comparable to many neighboring and peer states. At the same time, the state’s funding formula has become increasingly dependent upon student enrollment despite the fact that many school costs do not decline proportionally when enrollment falls.

The result is predictable. Districts lose revenue faster than they lose expenses. When enrollment declines, schools still need principals, counselors, bus routes, special education services, technology systems, utilities, insurance and building maintenance. Yet roughly 85% of Montana’s funding formula remains tied directly or indirectly to enrollment.

Add inflation and increasing voter resistance to local levies driven by property tax fatigue, and districts find themselves attempting to satisfy multiple legitimate priorities with insufficient resources.

That is the backdrop against which the STARS Act was adopted.

The legislation addressed a glaring problem: Montana ranked last in the nation in starting teacher pay. That ranking was not merely embarrassing; it was undermining the ability of schools to recruit the next generation of educators. STARS provided resources and incentives to begin correcting that problem.

What the legislation did not do was resolve the broader funding gap facing Montana’s public schools.

Consequently, some districts are now confronting difficult choices regarding how to distribute limited resources throughout their salary schedules. That is not evidence that the STARS Act failed. It is evidence that the underlying funding system remains inadequate.

Kalispell provides a useful example. Prior to STARS, beginning teacher pay stood at approximately 56% of average teacher compensation — one of the largest disparities in Montana. District leaders and trustees were confronted with a legitimate challenge: improve recruitment and competitiveness for new teachers while continuing to recognize the value of veteran educators.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether a flat-dollar distribution is the most appropriate approach or second-guess the judgment of trustees who chose that method. But those decisions are being made by locally elected trustees who are attempting to balance multiple constitutional, educational and financial obligations within a system they did not create. In doing so, trustees must weigh competing priorities and make difficult policy choices on behalf of their communities, often with no perfect solution available.

Critics are free to debate the choices trustees make. What is harder to dispute is the reality that those choices are occurring within a funding system that continues to ask school districts to do more with less. When resources are insufficient to fully address every legitimate priority, someone will inevitably argue that a different choice should have been made. That does not mean the underlying problem is the choice itself. It means the resources available are inadequate to satisfy all of the competing demands being placed upon the system.

The editorial asks whether gains at the bottom are coming at the expense of experienced teachers. A more important question is why school districts are being forced to make that choice at all.

The answer is not the STARS Act. The answer is a funding system that continues to place excessive reliance on declining enrollment, continues to lag behind the actual cost of providing a quality education and continues to depend upon local taxpayers to close the gap through increasingly difficult levy elections.

The lesson from Kalispell is not that the STARS Act raised the floor and lowered the ceiling.

The lesson is that the floor had fallen so far behind that it demanded immediate attention, while the larger structural funding challenges facing Montana schools remain unresolved.

Montana School Boards Association President Rick Cummings, President-elect Jennifer Hoffman and Vice President Stephanie Esch.