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Neeley v. West Orange-Cove Consolidated Independent School Dist.11/22/2005
on. According to the evidence, in 2001, Dew ISD in Freestone County had an adjusted taxable value of $300,384,388, a "weighted average daily attendance" ("WADA") of 147.43 students, and thus $2,037,488/WADA, while Boles ISD in Hunt County had an adjusted taxable value of $8,831,414, a WADA of 876.95 students, and thus $10,071/WADA. This 200-to-1 disparity was 700-to-1 in Edgewood I. Also, many districts have been created as tax havens - lots of property and few students - allowing property owners to escape paying their fair share of the cost of public education in Texas and making it more difficult to achieve efficiency. A system that operates with an excess of resources in some locales and a dearth in others is inefficient, as we held in Edgewood I and Edgewood II. Summing up in Edgewood III, we said:
The inefficiency was this gross disparity both in tax burden and in tax spending. To put it graphically, in some areas of the state, education resembled a motorcycle with a 1000-gallon fuel tank, and in other areas it resembled a tractor-trailer rig fueled out of a gallon bucket. Some vehicles were flooded, some purred along nicely, and some were always out of gas. A fleet of such vehicles is not efficient, even though a few of them may reach their destination. We did not hold that efficiency requires absolute equality in spending; rather, we said that citizens who were willing to shoulder similar tax burdens, should have similar access to revenues for education.
The large number of districts, with their redundant staffing, facilities, and administration, make it impossible to reduce costs through economies of scale. Bigger is not always better, but a multitude of small districts is undeniably inefficient. The justification offered for this situation is that as a matter of public policy, public schools should be locally controlled, although it has never been clear why the legitimate benefits of local control are so entirely inconsistent with efficiency in funding. Districts are firmly entrenched and powerfully resistant to meaningful change, and while matters have improved somewhat over the past century, the number of school districts has not declined significantly in the past two decades.
The purpose of Senate Bill 7 was to try to make funding public education with local property taxes efficient by reducing the effects of the vast disparities among the more than 1,000 independent school districts. School maintenance and operations ("M&O") are funded separately from facilities. Tax rates set yearly are capped at $1.50/$100 valuation for M&O (except for seven districts in Harris County ), as they have been for sixty years, and $0.50/$100 valuation for debt service on facilities (referred to as "I&S", for "interest and sinking fund"). For M&O, disparities in available revenue among the school districts are reduced in two ways: by supplementing property-poor district tax revenues with state funds through the Foundation School Program ("FSP") under chapter 42 of the Education Code, and by "recapture" - a scheme under chapter 41 of the Education Code by which property tax revenue is taken from property-rich ("chapter 41") districts and given to property-poor ("chapter 42") districts - referred to by some as "Robin Hood". Chapter 41 districts educate 12.3% of Texas students.
The FSP has two tiers for M&O. Tier 1 guarantees to all districts that tax at or above the rate of $0.86 per $100 valuation (and all districts but one do) a basic allotment of $2,537 per student in "average daily attendance" ("ADA"), subject to various special allotments and adjustments for district and student characteristics. Thus, any district with less than $295,000 value/ADA ($2,537 =
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