When Republican Gov. Gary Herbert rolled out his proposed state budget for the 2016 general legislative session, he made it clear that education was his top priority. One of the proposals is to put $422 million into the state’s public and higher education. State Democrats have issued their response to the Governor’s proposals.
Peter Corroon, Chair of the Utah Democratic Party, said that while the increased funding is a step in the right direction, problems still confront any attempt to spend more on education.
“The problem is it’s still less than a five percent increase in the weighted [pupil] unit. That really means that we’re not significantly increasing our funding for education,” Corroon said. “Our state legislature has spent the last 20 years slowly defunding our education system and now we’re in such a deep hole that hundreds of millions of dollars, while that sounds like a whole lot, has not made up for the billions of dollars that were taken out of the system.”
While $422 million represents 70 percent of the state’s increased tax revenues. That amount only comes to about a $206 increase in per-pupil spending. Corroon said that lawmakers will need to find a more stable funding base if they want to solve the problems associated with public education.
“Our message today is we need more funding for our education system. Thank you for what you’re doing in this budget but it’s still not where we need to be. We need smaller class sizes, we need increased teacher pay, and we need a permanent source of funding that can continue to fund our education system,” he said. “It can’t be one time because we’re in a good economic situation in the state; it needs to be permanent, on-going funding that will carry our education system into the future.”
Herbert also advocated spending a total of $1 billion on education over the next five years.
