Saddle Up

I would have been a Maverick.  In the cafeteria last night at Mid City High, I think back to the bumpy trail that was my high school career.  My conventional high school did well with students with conventional lives, but they didn’t have a clue about what to do with a kid working full-time to help support his family.  Who really cares if we lose a couple kids on the way to graduation?  That’s the way things are.

There are thirty or so parents, kids and officials in the room.  Tom Geyer is there from the Times, too (his story's here).  They are learning about the way things are.  Some of them already know.

A state formula shorts Davenport students out of more than $2,000 of funding on their way to graduation.  Some schools in Iowa get $6,366 a year per student from the state.  Some get $175 more per student, each year.  The state has a formula where some kids matter more than others. It’s a formula from the 1970s, and it suits the winners just fine.

Julie DeSalvo is a North High mom.  She’s been pressed into service to present this information to those in attendance.  She admits to being a little nervous, but she does a great job.  It’s an education friendly crowd, as you might imagine.  Representatives Winckler and Thede are present, as is Senator Brase.  There are multiple school board members in attendance, along with DCSD Board President Johansen and former President Zamora.  I talk with Patt before and after the meeting and sit in the back of the room at a table with Ralph.

Julie runs through a powerpoint that is damning.  Education funding continues to slide in Iowa, and our national ranking in education slides with it.  One of the principal reasons we moved to Iowa was its strong reputation for public education.  We left Wisconsin, which wasn’t exactly an education backwater.  Today, Wisconsin students receive nearly $2,000 more per student each year in education funding than Iowa students, with Wisconsin kids having passed Iowa kids in average ACT scores since we left bratwurst heaven.  Thomas Mortenson, a senior scholar at The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education in Washington, has extrapolated state education funding trends and projects Iowa will zero out state funding altogether by 2029.

That sounds ridiculous until Cindy, Phyllis and Chris get up to speak.  They note state funding that used to be called “allowable growth” is now called “supplemental state aid”.   It is way easier to cut something with “supplemental” in its title.  They discuss the legislative climate in Des Moines and the difference between 1.25% and 6% of increased education funding this year (that’s 4.75%, but I didn’t graduate with my high school class so I could be wrong).  The annual partisan rodeo isn’t why I came to the meeting.

I came to the meeting to learn more about the rationale for why Davenport kids matter less than others, and what we are going to do about it.  It’s outrageous that Davenport students get shorted out of education funding other Iowa kids receive and I was hoping for a spirited plan of action to remedy the inequity.  We get a fact sheet and a contact list for area legislators, and are asked to write letters.  Ok, I’ll write some letters.

But more needs to be done.  Davenport kids matter just as much as other kids.  If that’s a maverick notion to some, they need to have their posterior kicked.