The way Missouri funds public schools is way out of date. Our students deserve more | Opinion

In August, a headline in The Kansas City Star told us: “Report says Missouri is one of the worst states in US for early education. Here’s why.” It cited a report by the state auditor that concluded that Missouri ranked fourth worst overall, and — even worse — 49th in the nation in state funding for educational resources.

I am writing today to urge state lawmakers and the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to start making the changes necessary to fix this and ensure our children receive the education they have a right to.

For many years, I taught high school English in the Kansas City Public Schools district. Currently, I teach GED classes. Both these positions have offered me a direct line of view of how catastrophically Missouri fails its children. It is time to hold state lawmakers and the education department responsible for the poor education Missouri’s children are subjected to.

According to the education research website ThinkImpact, 65% of Missouri children are not reading proficiently. As with many other social problems, there are different reasons as to why our children do so poorly in school, but there is one issue that seems to connect them all: funding.

Missouri uses a formula that determines how districts in the state receive funding — the Missouri foundation formula. And this blueprint places the burden of giving our schools the resources they need on the shoulders of local property owners.

The same report that placed Missouri as the fourth worst state in state funding also determined that 68% of local school districts have seen an increase in reliance on local funding in the last decade.

Not only does the current formula rely heavily on local property taxes — it is also ineffective. Approved in 2005, the formula was presented as a way to fund our schools equitably and adequately. But one only has to drive across city borders in the Kansas City metropolitan area to see the stark differences in availability of resources.

At the start of this school year, Blue Springs High School welcomed students with a brand new aquatics center and a larger, updated campus. Lincoln College Preparatory Academy, a Kansas City Public Schools signature high school, had to send students home because of inadequate cooling systems in a heat wave. Both these schools rank favorably among Missouri’s best, but the difference in the resources available to students is shameful. Some may even say it’s unconstitutional.

The foundation formula is also based on outdated information and does not account for inflation. The calculations are based on property taxes that were assessed before the program was approved in 2005.

The Missouri foundation formula is grossly inequitable to districts with higher poverty levels and students with disabilities. It withholds funding from districts with lower attendance rates. The data from recent studies shows clearly that students living in poverty or with a disability are disproportionately more likely to miss school due to a variety of reasons that are fully outside of their control.

I urge my fellow Missourians to join me in demanding that lawmakers such as state Rep. Brad Pollitt, chair of the Elementary and Secondary Education Committee, and leaders at the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education act now to reevaluate the state’s funding formula.

Regardless of which ZIP code we live in, we deserve to live in a state that upholds our children’s 14th Amendment right to equal access to education.