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John Jarpe: The intention of Proposal A
Published 10:39pm Wednesday, April 6, 2011I was quite pleased when I got the opportunity to write a guest column for the Daily Star. My very first job, when I was 11 years old, was delivering the Star door-to-door in my Eastside neighborhood. I grew up in Niles, and graduated from NHS in 1968. I got a great education in Niles and I can recall some wonderful teachers. When I entered the University of Michigan as a freshman in the fall of ’68, I believe I was as ready for college as anyone else. I want the generation now in school to have all the opportunities I had all those years ago.
School funding was an issue back in those days, just as it is now. Tax dollars went to fund public schools and boards of education had to decide where to spend the money. That much has been true all these years. Even then, with tight budgets, we had those great classroom teachers, and as I said, I was prepared for college.
Changes in school funding came in 1994. Before 1994, the amount of money for schools in Michigan depended a lot on where you lived. If you lived in a school district that had very high property values, or had a big business or industrial tax base, your schools got a considerably larger amount of property tax money. If your district was mainly residential, and did not have lots of upscale homes or big businesses, you had less operating funds. In many cases, there was almost a 3-to-1 difference when you compared the wealthiest and the poorest districts in the state. In order to keep up and fund the schools, boards of education had to ask residents to vote for millage increases that raised property taxes. The local millage vote days were certainly not the “good old days” of school finance. Michigan was one of the highest property tax states in the nation, many schools still struggled financially, and there were “haves” and “have nots” among the districts of the state.
In 1994, we approved Proposal A. Statewide sales taxes reduced property taxes, and we were no longer dependent on locally voted millages. To a large extend, Proposal A worked to keep property taxes in line. There is still a gap between the highest and lowest funded districts, but it is not nearly as great as it was in the millage-dependent days.
However, when we voted for Proposal A in 1994, the understanding was that K-12 schools would be funded by the state sales tax. There was no mention or campaigning about any of the sales tax dollars going to fund universities or community colleges. Right now the Governor’s proposed budget calls for using the School Aid Fund for K-12 districts and higher education. This proposed distribution of funds will hurt K-12 public schools all over the state.
If you agree with me, that the voters in 1994 intended for the School Aid Fund to be used for public K-12 schools, let your state representative, state senator and governor know your feelings. If you disagree and believe all those funds are meant for community colleges, universities and our public schools as well, let them know that, too. They have extremely important decisions to make in the next two months, and they need to hear from the citizens of Michigan.
We want our students as prepared for the next level as any generation has been.
Tags: John Jarpe
Why not6 close all the schools now, and save ourselves a lot of Time and Money.
The poor are breeding like rats, and soon we will have to find ways of ridding America of them, by hook or crook.
Or else the Real Americans will be burdened by them.
with the availabilaty of good chinese products, what need have we of.
How many employees does McDonalds, or Wal-Mart need
anyway?
the poor and Middle Class, much less educating their broods.
They are keeping the rich, and worthy of being all they can be, by just their existance alone.
anybody know a good source of Iceburgs?
What Dr. Jarpe did not address is the fact that Prop.A no longer provide even adequate funding for K-12 education. Whie the reliance on sales tax revenues did indeed provide great increases in the basic foundation grants for many districts that due to low tax bases were sorely underfunded, we have now come to the point where sales tax collections have decreased and our schools now are facing cuts. It would serve the public better to be remonstrating their repersentatives to find and fund a method of funding public education-all public education,K-16 that does not rely on the whims of a retail economy.
It would also behoove responders to, rather than offering trite parables that serve no real purpose, to offer constructive replies. Your class warfare rants are getting old Sam.
Well mike, I am doing a parady, of Your Coolidge, Taft, and Harding principals in economics, we have been going down since Reagan of trickle Down, deregulation buisness at all cost.
when You scream no New taxes, and cuttaxes for the Top,
while abandoning all social contracts, and Loyalties.
your party has increased military, and buisness subsidies at the cost of the needs of Real People for Paper Corprate persons which have no Loyalties to either America or Americans.
that annual 37 percent increase has real consequences, and we are now seeing the dismantling of all societal Improvements, of the two Roosevelts, Kennedy,
johnson, and even carter giving Wall street dictitorial powers.
What You deem as the real America, that Will enslave the Masses into the wage Slaveries of the past, into
a surfdom to the kings of Wall street, yet Your stupid philosophy has blinded You.
We now are at the dismantling of even the Middle class.
It is You who are engaged in the real class warfare.
just what do you think the ultra right wing Republicans have been doing to america since Reagan?
Sending it’s profits and productivity Overseas for
their own disloyal greed.
The Democratic policies since FDR have CREATED more poverty than any depression or recession ever could have. Roosevelt, with his New Deal extended the Great Depression by years due to his stubborn refusal to forego his plans for a worker’s paradise, and Johnson’s War on Poverty has condemned millions of Americans to generational poverty and reliance on governmtal assistance. The notion that government must lead a society is a failed one. Societies are led by the individual and the desire of that individual to work or create. Your heroes have robbed too many Americans of that their dreams. Now their only dreams are of what more they can get for nothing. Rather than creating wealth by confiscating from others you have created the zero liability citizen. In fact you and yours have created a nation of nearly half of its citizens who have, as your new hero Joe Biden might say, no skin in the game. That in itself proves your policies have failed. It is time to move on, Sam, you’ve lost Utopia. It isn’t there.
A society that does not protect it’s own Economy,
will not last long.
We are a Young experiment in our Form, nations, have come
before, yet are no longer, because of Common causes.
of these is the parity between Poverty, and wealth.
the ignoring of the needs of it’s people.
and being taken over by the Powerful for their own needs,
desires, and wants, over the needs of all.
A Government is a tool of it’s people, to do for those people,
not to do upon those people.
at one time We all created Jobs, and spent our monies in
support our common citizenry, and our standards kept rising because of that.
today we work to support credit cards, and Wall Street, and not our own
common good.
we Import exotic, as Rome, and Greece did before they ran headlong unto
oblivion.
We are, if You cannot see that upon that same road, but have the ability
to run into greatness, or unto nothingness.
what You desire, is what the Confederate states wanted, in
fact the same battle cries are heard, and what it leads to is
the Super gentry, and the lowly Wage Slave.
you think somehow you are Special mike and will be spared?
because You own a few shares?
a nation should by it’s very nature of self Interest, supply it’s own needs,
by the employments of it’s own, at a fair compensation.
We are a unique Nation blessed with great natural resources, that
belong to us all, but are now controlled by a few self interested Concerns,
that derive us either little, to no compensations for.
we are a nation blinded by the greed of a few to see the
needs of the Many, asleep as the Poetical propagandist lead
us off the cliff, shouting “SHUT UP” to anyone awake enough to see
Mike,
you are ignorant of the fact, that it is in
your own self interest to hire Your
own first, at a reasonable compensation.
You support them, and they in return Support You.
America’s leaders of commerce have forgotten their
own long term self interest, for short term Greed.
as the standards of living rises around You, so
rises your standard of living.
if that does not happen sooner or later there
comes a tipping point, and we all fall into the pit
of chaos.
When power is so concentrated unto a few, you fall
prey to those few, whom will never be satisfied with enough, as enough.
and they become so gluttonous they begin to devoir their own young.