Stop Cutting Funding for Schools

Alexandria Grady
Molly Brost
English 201.301
May 22, 2012
Too Broke for an Education
Education is one of the most funded things in America. People hold fundraisers in its honor and put influential effective educators on a pedestal so other teachers and educators have something to aspire to become. The residents of Indiana are for a public education but many think that government is not. The State of Indiana has been cutting funding to schools since 2002 (Zher). Since 2010, Governor Mitch Daniels has cut 600 million dollars from K-12 and higher education (Rader). He stated that he had to make cuts everywhere so Indiana didn’t go more into debt. Yet some school districts get more funding than others. Pamela Walter states “States do not always distribute social funds in an equal fashion, and education is no exception. The more common pattern, however, is for some groups to have access to more or better educational opportunities-even in public sectors-than others (Walters 35).” I believe that cutting the education budget and distributing what is left unevenly, is going to hurt the education of students in this state.
How a school district distributes their funds is simple. About 46.3% comes from the state, 43.7% comes from local taxes and 1.6% comes from the federal government. If the state cuts it percentage and if the house values go down, schools are losing 25 to 40% of their annual budget. Some schools in Indiana have been scrambling to attempt to not have it affect the education of the students. The State Fiscal Stabilization Funds (SFSF) from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) helped districts limit their budget cuts, but those funds are expected to run out by 2011. According to a survey by the American Association of School Administrators budget cuts are noticeably more significant this school year than they were in either 2008-09 or 2009-10. In the survey, they found that seventy-eight percent of districts planned to cut budgets in 2010-11, up...