Bill would help ease new schools’ start-up costs

BOISE – Fast-growing school districts need help from the state to deal with the costs of growth, state lawmakers were told Thursday.

“We’ve been opening so many schools,” Mike Vuittonet, chairman of the Meridian School Board, told the Senate Education Committee. “We will probably grow by 1,500 students every year. … We find ourselves in a crisis situation.”

Meridian, the state’s largest and fastest-growing school district, proposed new legislation to help districts with the start-up costs to open new schools, after local voters have approved bond issues to build the schools. Meridian has opened eight schools in four years, has two more under construction, and needs six more by 2008.

Bond issues funded by voter-approved property tax increases pay for the school construction. But those don’t cover the increased operating expenses for districts as new schools open, from utilities to additional custodial staff to bringing on librarians and counselors. SB 1144 would pay school districts an additional amount when they open new schools, to cover those start-up costs the first year, with declining payments for the second and third years.

The bill would cost the state an estimated $2.4 million next year, and more in subsequent years.

Senate Education Chairman John Goedde, R-Coeur d’Alene and a former school board member, said Coeur d’Alene has had to run supplemental levies – additional, two-year, voter-approved property tax increases – to cover operating costs, and has included the start-up costs for new schools in those levies. “This may help us,” he said about SB 1144.

However, he noted that while SB 1144 might win support in the Education Committee, which includes senators from many of the state’s fastest-growing school districts, it might not be as easy to pass in the full Senate, where many senators represent slow-growing or even declining school districts.

“I am concerned about the equity issue,” Goedde said.

Beverly Hines, a mother of three school-age students in the Meridian district, said the schools there are terribly overcrowded. But even with voter support for bond issues, she said, “We couldn’t afford to open the schools up.”

Eric Exline, spokesman for the Meridian district, told the panel that the district already has portable classrooms “all over the place.” One elementary school has so many portables, he said, that it’s up to 900 students.

Ginny Greger, a board member in the nearby Kuna school district, said her district passed bonds to open two new elementary schools, one next year and the other the year after. The openings had to be staggered, she said, because of the high start-up costs.

“It’s going to cost us at least $400,000 to bring on these schools,” she said. In the Kuna district, she said, that’s equal to the district’s entire discretionary state funding for the year – which means it couldn’t add textbooks or anything else.

Becky Ford, assistant superintendent of the Post Falls School District, said in a telephone interview that her district has faced major start-up costs with new schools like River City Middle School, which opened this year.

“This is a very good-faith effort at helping particularly the growing districts,” she said of the legislation.

The Senate Education Committee reached no decision on the bill Thursday, and Goedde said he’ll continue the hearing on it next week. If the bill were to pass, it would be up to the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee to include the additional funding in the budget for public schools.