Tiverton Citizens for Change

Go to town meetings for a while, and you’ll eventually hear some elected or appointed official — more often than not School Committee Vice Chair Sally Black — list the lack of a fair education funding formula at the state level among the reasons for Tiverton’s financial woes.

The missing consideration is that reworking such a formula to make it “fair” means that some of Rhode Island’s cities and towns will receive less, and I’ve always suspected that Tiverton would be among them.   Therefore, I’m unsurprised that the funding formula that the state Education Department proposed last week would trim Tiverton’s state aid by $1.5 million, or 26.9%:

While the specific numbers are preliminary and subject to General Assembly approval, the leaders of the House and Senate and the state commissioner of education support the passage of such an education funding formula before the end of June. …

… the formula — which takes into account student enrollment, student need, and local tax capacity, among other factors — hurts and helps some communities regardless of their size or location.

No doubt, the people who’ve stressed the need for a “fair funding formula” through years of budget shortfalls (combined with broad inaction) are sure to spit up their tea at the notion that Barrington may see its aid almost triple (albeit from a tiny base of $2.0 million) while their own decreases.  It’s been clear to anybody who’s paid attention that what town officials mean when they say “fair” is “manipulating policy to give us more taxpayer dollars without having to pay a political price for taking it ourselves.”

For that reason, residents should consider an update to the formula to be unlikely. In the meantime, there’s no better strategy for addressing annual budgetary shortfalls than fashioning budgets that do not rely on the calculations and manipulations of the governing gang in Providence.