Minutes - 20031204 - Laserfiche WebLink

Browse Search

Genie Kamives: I'm sorry to keep you up late, and forgive my voice. But as an Orange County parent, I went to my children's winter concert tonight, so I had to sign up late this evening. And I also have to admit to getting very angry at assertions that the feelings of the Orange County schools are due to uninvolved parents, I guess, like myself. It has been said at previous public hearings that school funding does not correlate with the educational opportunity. That being the case, had I been here earlier, I had planned to ask each of you from the City school district who agree with that statement to stand up. Then I had planned to ask them to keep standing if they were willing to give up that special district tax that provides that additional funding for their children's schools. I seriously doubt that I would have seen anybody left standing. Although not unanimous, the majority of the high court opinions concerning the issues of funding public systems include that better funding is related to the level of educational opportunity provided by the schools. According to John Dayton in "Correlating Expenditures and Educational Opportunity in School Funding Litigation: The Judicial Perspective"; "The Supreme Court of New Jersey in Abbott vs. Buke noted `all of the evidence of high quality education in the richer suburbs on this record attests to the role of money in producing it.' The court further supported its conclusion regarding the significance of money to educational opportunity observing that the decisions made by school officials 'are based on the premise that what money buys affects the quality of education.' The court Hated that the conventional wisdom that money affects quality `is Hat just for laypersons, it is the fundamental premise of decision-making by those in charge of education in the districts and in the state.' "According to the Supreme Court of California: `Quality cannot be defined wholly in terms of performance on state-wide achievement tests because such tests da not measure all the benefits and detriments that a child may receive from his educational experience.' If standardized test scores were the only hallmark of quality educational opportunity, it would make little sense for the wealthiest schools to offer their diverse curricula with courses other than those needed to improve standardized test scores. Achievement and opportunity are not the same thing. Constitutions cannot guarantee equal achievement. Instead, constitutions address equality of treatment and educational opportunity." To those that believe the problem in the County district is not how much money, but how the money is spent, Dayton offers the following: "If we had reached the level of diminishing returns and wasted expenditures in our poorest schools, one might question why wealthier schools have continued to spend many times the amount of money poorer schools were deemed to require to provide appropriate educational opportunities far their children. Absent evidence of gross mismanagement in poorer schools, it could be concluded that either educational opportunities were unequal, or that wealthy districts were wasting substantial amounts of money." Since the last public hearing, one Commissioner has proposed that a countywide school tax be instituted at four cents per hundred-dollar valuation, which would provide an additional $1.5 million to the County district for the coming year. This would provide for only one half of last year's unmet needs. Yet the City district tax, which would remain in place, would be allowed to increase almost unrestrained. I find this solution woefully