Editorial Roundup: Recent editorials in Oklahoma newspapers

Here are excerpts from recent editorials in Oklahoma newspapers:

Tulsa World. April 22, 2017.

Keeping the public schools functioning these days is a difficult job. Schools have had their budgets slashed, and many teachers are calling it quits, leaving schools shorthanded. That has forced schools to take drastic measures. Going to a four-day week has proven to be a popular way to save money.

Popular and wrong.

State Schools Superintendent Joy Hofmeister is sympathetic to the problems faced by schools, but she fears that the four-day school week is spreading like a “contagion” as a way to attract and keep teachers. It’s a sad logic: Work for Oklahoma schools, sure you get paid a lot less, but you only have to work four days a week.

The attraction of the four-day week for some teachers is that it gives them extra time to work a second or third job to make ends meet. Others take advantage of the shortened week to plan and collaborate with other teachers. So, they are working without pay.

This school year, 97 districts have adopted the four-day week. That’s almost double the 49 districts that made the change last year. Another 44 more are considering the move for next year, the state Department of Education says.

House Bill 1684 would require school districts considering a four-day week to submit a plan to the Department of Education detailing the goals hoped to be achieved.

As far as we’re concerned, the four-day school week is bad policy. It breaks the continuity of teaching, turns children away from what is often their only reliable source of food, creates childcare problems for working parents and opens the door to delinquency, among other problems. Further, a Department of Education study shows there is little to no economic gain from the move.

HB 1684 is not a solution. It seems, however, to be the least the state can do to keep track of those districts that do adopt the four-day week and makes districts justify the move.

We hasten to add, of course, that adequate funding from the Legislature would make the whole exercise unnecessary.

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Enid News & Eagle. April 22, 2017.

We are in a bit of a situation.

Those are the words of Karl White, the respected chief financial officer for Enid Public Schools.

At a recent Enid Public Schools Board of Education meeting, this headline emerged: Our district’s budget shortfall could top $1 million.

School superintendents are dealing with gut-wrenching decisions if legislators can’t find a way to properly fund education.

This crisis is not just happening in Enid. Shawn P. Sheehan was the 2016 Oklahoma Teacher of the Year and finalist for national teacher of the year. The special education math teacher at Norman High School recently blogged about whether he should continue to teach in the state of Oklahoma.

“The news is grim,” Sheehan wrote. “We’re now in our third consecutive year of enduring mid-year cuts to education funding and we’ve been dealing with a downward spiral in funding since 2008.”

Sheehan and his wife did the next logical thing: getting certified in Texas.

“We love our school, our district, our city, our students, and their families, but what’s happening to education in the state of Oklahoma is criminal,” Sheehan wrote. “And the thing is, it’s not just education. The recurring budget deficits have reduced all core state services to scraps.

“How can I ask for a raise when we don’t have the money to fund police and firefighters, DHS (Department of Human Services), and our prison systems, let alone education? You don’t have to be a math teacher to know that our budget simply doesn’t work. And yet, as a state, we’ve continued to elect the same folks who create the same problems and approach them with the same ineffective solutions.”

We hope we haven’t grown immune to the bad news. This is a really serious situation that lawmakers must solve.

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The Oklahoman. April 24, 2017.

As they grapple with an $878 million shortfall, state lawmakers are considering a wide range of tax and fee increases. That’s to be expected, but one would hope lawmakers would learn from the mistakes of the past. Yet there are indications they are instead poised to try the same thing again hoping for a different result.

Consider House Bill 2345, one of several bills unveiled last week only hours before lawmakers voted on them. HB 2345 would raise the fee for a wide range of coin-operated vending machines from $75 annually to $150. That fee is assessed on vending machines instead of requiring operators to collect sales tax on each item sold. HB 2345’s fee increase is predicted to provide lawmakers with another $3.5 million to spend.

If that plan sounds familiar, there’s a reason. Lawmakers approved the same fee in 2010 for the same reason. Facing a large shortfall that year, lawmakers scrambled for money. At that time, the fee for vending machines was $50 apiece. The fee hadn’t been increased since the 1980s, so lawmakers voted to boost it to $150, based in part on the argument that the fee should keep pace with inflation.

At the time, Gov. Brad Henry defended that and other fee increases, saying budget writers were careful to “only increase fees that hadn’t been increased in literally decades to bring them up to the cost in general of the service provided.”

According to Oklahoma Tax Commission records, there were more than 54,000 vending machines in the state in 2010. But by 2011, industry officials were projecting a 30 percent reduction in the number of vending machines in Oklahoma because of the higher fee.

At the time, Rep. Charles Ortega, R-Altus, said lawmakers expected the fee to generate $8.5 million, but instead its real-world impact was expected to translate into “a loss of $6.5 million to the state by the time you factor in job reduction.” He authored legislation to roll back the fee increase from $150 to $75. That bill quickly passed the Legislature.

In short, lawmakers tried to impose a 200 percent increase on vending machine fees in 2010, and found the market could bear only a 50 percent increase. Yet now it appears they may impose a 100 percent increase and are hoping things will turn out differently this time.

The rate of the fee increase is certainly far greater than what would be required to adjust for inflation. The inflation calculator on the website of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates it would take less than $84 today to match the buying power of $75 in May 2010.

Perhaps the marketplace has changed dramatically in the six years that have passed since lawmakers rolled back the prior $150 fee, and vending machine operators are flush with cash and can easily withstand a new $150 fee. But that seems a stretch. And the way this proposal was hastily unveiled and advanced also makes one question if lawmakers bothered to examine what happened the last time this idea was tried.

In considering revenue proposals, lawmakers must strive to ensure new taxes or fees don’t have dramatic negative impact on the private sector. Because budget “solutions” that reduce economic activity don’t solve budget shortfalls; they perpetuate them.