Well now that the dust has settled it is apparent that Louisiana voters rose to the occasion and rejected the smoke and mirrors game that Governor Landry and some of his Republican cronies tried to pull on the public regarding educational funding in this state. Or should I say the lack of educational funding.
But sadly, the teachers were used as pawns by these folks and ended up on the short end.
As is common knowledge the Louisiana Teachers Retirement System is in debt to the tune of approximately $8.5 billion. This debt stems from years of irresponsible budgeting practices by Louisiana state policymakers. It is them, not educators, that are responsible for the system’s large and growing unfunded liabilities.
Nationwide, the state of Louisiana doesn’t wisely allocate a lot of money for Pre-K through college education. However, years ago in an attempt to address this issue, monies derived from oil spill settlements and tobacco company settlements with the state were put into education trust funds specified as the Education Excellence Fund, the Louisiana Education Quality Trust Fund, and the Louisiana Quality Education Trust Fund. These funds totaling $2 billion were wisely protected from Louisiana legislators by law because the interest generated from these funds could only be used to fund educational initiatives in Pre-K through 12 and college programs.
In other word these three educational trust funds were created to ensure that public school systems and colleges would have a protected stream of money to finance priority programs and important initiatives for the long-term.
However, if voters had approved the amendment which claimed that teachers and support staff would receive a permanent raise, all these education funds would have been defunded and the entire principal amount of $2 billion would have been used to buy down the debt originally caused by our legislators, thus reducing the amount of monies that districts would have to pay into the retirement system. The districts were to use those monetary savings to fund permanent raises for teachers and support staff. However, I am not sure what would happen if the local districts refused to do that because some stated they still wouldn’t be able to fund the raises even with the savings because in reality the state was not allocating the districts any additional funding.
And the other unknown was it would now be up to our legislators each fiscal year to decide whether or not to fund the programs that were discontinued as a result of this change. And with an already projected deficit for the next fiscal year, the chances of funding these additional programs each year is most surely non-existent.
In summary, it was a dirty trick for the governor to pit the teaching labor force against established guaranteed education support programs' funding sources. No matter what the voter outcome education funding in this state would have suffered even further.
