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The old joke about mules is that they're reasonably obedient once you get their attention, but you have to whack the critter upside the head with a two-by-four to get its attention.
By that reckoning, our legislature needs another whack, maybe with a bridge timber this time. I've lost track of how many times we Coloradans have marched to the polls to make it clear that we want lottery money to go to parks and open space.
But the legislature dipped into lottery proceeds for
prisons. We voters said stop it.
Now some
legislators propose to use lottery money for school
construction.
If schools are worth funding, they're worth funding with regular taxes. Funding them from the lottery puts the state in the business of encouraging gambling, which many people consider a low vice.
In other words, if the state raised the tobacco tax, with proceeds going to school construction, would it then be proper for the state to promote the pleasures of nicotine addiction?
One example recently produced by the education-lobby sob-sisters is Leadville. Some of its schools have cracked roof beams, the snow load is heavy, etc.
Well, Lake County voters had a bond issue before them last fall. They turned it down; they decided that their money would be better spent elsewhere. If Leadville doesn't want to spend money on its school buildings, why should we?
The real problem there is that of the 6,000 residents of
Lake County, about 1,500 of them toil for the Vail
Sacred Trust
resort empire in Summit and Eagle
counties.
These people send their children to school in Lake County. But Lake County doesn't collect property or sales taxes from the Sacred Trust domain. It just gets the costs of accommodating low-paid no-benefit seasonal transient labor.
A school capital construction fund might replace a building there, but it wouldn't cover the on-going costs that Lake County endures. It isn't Lotto players who cause the problem -- it's Vail Associates and the I-70 Resort Belt.
But our state government would rather promote gambling than tax big corporations at a rate high enough to cover the public costs they induce. By dipping into the lottery money, our state government has just discovered yet another way to subsidize the ski industry.
Further, there's no guarantee that the Leadvilles and La
Juntas of this state would get anything like the money they
supposedly need. Our state constitution already requires
uniform public education,
and it's anything but that
now. If school equalization really mattered to Coloradans,
we'd have tended to it by now.
I have no trouble believing that a rich school district
like Cherry Creek will find a way to tap the lottery fund
if it can, to the detriment of poor districts. When there's
money involved, our public entities have no shame -- Winter
Park, one of the richest and fastest-growing towns in the
state, once declared itself blighted
so as to hustle
some tax-increment financing.
There's always the argument that kids from poor school districts will be doomed if old buildings aren't replaced.
But their parents, if they think that's important, can tax themselves. Or they can start a charter school. Or they can spend time reading to their children, or going over homework, or a hundred other things help make kids learn.
If the parents don't care, then it doesn't matter how modern the building. The only consistent predictor about how well kids will do in school is not district spending nor advanced degrees among faculty, but how much energy their parents devote to their education. And that's something lottery dollars can't change.
Are buildings a good investment now? I've talked to five
kids who attend high school via the Internet, and four of
them thought it was a great improvement on the cliques,
cowboy gangs, petty snobbery, jock favoritism, mindless
rah-rah and other facets of the socialization
process
offered by our public schools.
There's also the local-control angle. Every three years, our school administrators propose a middle school, and every three years, it gets voted down. Salidans don't want a middle school, and for good reasons -- they're disciplinary horrors, and the site proposed here is worse than inconvenient.
But we might get one anyway if the local educrats could persuade the state to buy one with lottery money.
Currently we can whack these mules with a two-by-four when they don't pay attention. But making the lottery a source of school construction money would further diminish public control of public education. It's a bad idea, and it comes despite the frequent and fervent opposition expressed by Colorado voters.
Why do they keep running those surveys about why people don't trust the government when all they have to do is read the paper?
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