Matt Blunt Balances Education Budget on Backs of Wealthier School Districts

Matt Blunt has done it again! Apparently, teachers unions and administrators are aghast (or, as their product might spell it, agasd) because the new Missouri state educational funding formula allocates less money than before to wealthier school districts and more money than before to less wealthy districts:

More than half of Missouri's school districts stand to suffer because of a provision in a new school funding formula, according to a teachers union.

Let's read the story. So who gets more money? Troubled urban districts:

• St. Louis city schools.
  
  
• Kansas City city schools.

Who gets less money? Flush suburban districts:

• Parkway.
  
  
• Ladue.
  
  
• Lindbergh.
  
  
• Kirkwood.
  
  
• Pattonville.
  
  
• Webster Groves.
  
  
• Clayton.
  
  
• Brentwood.

Oh, sure, those school districts would argue they could flush more money:

Lindbergh School District Superintendent James Sandfort called the new formula an affront to Lindbergh students and taxpayers. "My reaction was disbelief," Sandfort said Friday. "My assumption all along was that the school district would receive the same or a little more money in the coming years than what we have received. The impact is negative to some school districts where it was supposed to be at worst neutral. I can't believe this was what the governor or Legislature intended."

David Glaser, chief financial officer in the Rockwood School District, said: "Everyone always said no district would lose money under a new formula. That promise needs to be kept."

Especially if it was state tax money, which comes with less accountability than money raised in district. Because you really cannot ever have too many administrators, swimming pools, or gymnasia.

Oddly enough, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch failed to get on-the-record comments from school district officials who would receive more state money (not that they would go on the record supporting a limiting of tax money flowing into school coffers) nor from taxpayers, like me, who think this formula sounds like it's a better reapportionment of existing limited funds.

Let us here at DMB2008 then express our continued support of a governor (and hopefully President of the United States in 2009!) who can make hard financial decisions even when pressured by the normal lampreys of the left.