School board decries funding change

As their schools struggle with water leaks, crumbling sidewalks and sinking floors, members of the Hamilton County Board of Education have deep apprehensions about ceding control of $6 million that was reserved in their proposed budget for needed building repairs.

“This is not a compromise,” school board member Ben Connor, D-Chattanooga, said during a meeting Thursday evening. “Compromises are when equal parties come together and they make a plan based on a discussion, and after that discussion, they come to an agreement. Compromises don’t have ultimatums. They don’t have threats. This is a political stickup. It’s a political heist, and it was done on purpose.”

Amid a windfall in new revenue under the state’s new school funding formula, the Hamilton County Board of Education intended to increase its spending on deferred maintenance from $2 million to $8 million in the proposed budget for the fiscal year that will start July 1.

However, the board voted 8-2 on a last-minute resolution Thursday to reduce the amount back to $2 million in favor of the county using that $6 million for a more substantial bond issuance — something county leaders say could actually allow them to complete building repairs at a quicker clip. Members Karitsa Jones, D-Chattanooga, and Larry Grohn, R-East Ridge, voted against the measure.

“At the very least, $6 million is going to turn into $60 million bonded,” Tucker McClendon, deputy mayor of education and workforce development, told the school board Thursday. “It’s really only upside.”

The move is designed to ensure the budget receives support from county commissioners, who will be voting on the proposal Wednesday, but it has frustrated school board members, who argued it could reduce the say they have over the use of the money and how quickly they can access it. The panel approved the resolution under the condition there be an interlocal agreement guaranteeing the money be used for deferred maintenance.

“If this gets passed and they don’t honor their word, I’ve been a pretty quiet and reserved guy my seven years on this board, I won’t be, and it won’t be a lot of fun for those folks on the other end,” school board member Joe Wingate, R-Chattanooga, said before the vote, “because as far as I’m concerned, this is just games.”

School board member Jill Black, D-Lookout Mountain, said everyone on the panel agrees the district needs to provide more funding for building repairs.

A 2020 report completed by the consultant MGT found the Hamilton County school district has hundreds of millions of dollars worth of facility needs.

“I went to one of my schools on the very first day of school this year, and there was a waterfall in the office,” Black told her colleagues. “They had a 30-gallon trash can catching water in the office on the first day of school, and this kind of stuff is evident all over this county. This is just another way to play kick the can. We’ve been playing kick the can for 20 years. We’ve let our schools decay for 20 years.”

By state law, Hamilton County must maintain at least the same level of local funding for schools as it did in the prior year — a requirement called “maintenance of effort.” Commissioner Ken Smith, R-Hixson, said in a phone call that his colleagues have had concerns about letting an unsustainable amount of tax revenue flow to schools, thereby putting the county on the hook for that same level of funding on a yearly basis.

“We may hit a future year — could be next year — where those sales dollars are not realized and we’ve got a deficit now that the commission has to fund due to that maintenance of effort,” he said.

Smith said this could be the beginning of a partnership between the commission and the school board by which the county uses growth money to cover maintenance for the district so the school board can stay focused on in-classroom education.

Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp presented a proposed budget to county commissioners June 7 that included a roughly $98 million increase for Hamilton County Schools, bringing the education budget from $523 million in fiscal year 2023 to more than $621 million in fiscal year 2024.

Under a new formula Tennessee is using to distribute money for public schools, the majority of the new funding is from the state. About $19 million was additional local tax revenue, Wamp said in a phone call Friday.

The mayor said he hopes to leverage that $6 million into a bond issuance that could provide even more money for school repairs by leaning on the county’s strong borrowing power.

“We’ve made a prudent decision to lower maintenance of effort but spend the same amount of money on education,” he said in a phone call. “Because the county has the ability to bond that $6 million, it will greatly accelerate the timeline on which we can meet the school facilities needs.”

After several conversations with county officials, Superintendent Justin Robertson told school board members Thursday, Robertson said he ultimately determined the district wouldn’t receive the votes necessary from commissioners to approve the budget as originally proposed, and he opted for the compromise board members approved Thursday.

Overall, he said, this is a good agreement because it would help preserve the central components of the district’s budget, including a 5% raise for teachers and other staff.

“I don’t think anyone on this board would want to see those cut,” Robertson told the board Thursday.

Commission Chair Chip Baker (R-Signal Mountain) said in a phone call Friday that he’s concerned about the timing.

“This is the kind of thinking and opportunity that in my opinion we should have talked about a few months back,” Baker said. “We’re all in the business of planning … The most important thing is we have early and often dialogue that results in positive changes.”

Commissioner Joe Graham, R-Lookout Valley, stressed that teachers should receive raises before funding goes to any other new programs in the system’s budget, and he criticized comments made during the school board meeting Thursday.

“We’re all supposed to be working for Hamilton County, not attacking each other like that,” he said.

Graham said he won’t agree to a bond issuance to cover school maintenance — that can’t actually be done, he argued — and he doesn’t agree with the school board’s decision to add a memorandum of understanding as a condition for the funding change.

“This is general government monies that haven’t been allocated to the school system yet,” he said. “That’s why we’re elected officials ourselves.”