Sen. Evan Vickers' ICSD Board Meeting Remarks on How Utah Schools are Funded

The Iron Bulwark took some time to transcribe Senator Evan Vickers' remarks when he spoke to the Iron County School District Administration, School Board, and Community regarding how schools in Utah are funded.

Some of the numbers and things presented had moved relatively quickly, so The Iron Bulwark thought it would be good to provide this information to the public as an Education & Readings piece.

We could not easily find the referenced documents that were presented, so we took screenshots from the recording.

If you would like to watch these moments of the meeting, it begins about here and ends here (approx. 20 1/2 minutes).

Just a couple things, and I appreciate the opportunity to spend some time with you.

Representative Shipp and I talked, and we tried to get some information of what the state is doing. We’re not here to influence in any way. We’re here to provide information.

The fact that you’re here, and you have to go through Truth in Taxation, it’s interesting - Utah was the first state to go through this back in 1985. 

Since then, numerous states have gone along and followed with that.

When we talk about public education, we always get this poke that, “Well Utah spends less per pupil than any state. And everyone’s fighting for the bottom.”

But I got to tell you, if you dig into that and look a little bit, the percentage of tax revenue that goes to education - is very high. And then a couple of other things along the way - if you look at the percent of education money that goes to administration, nationwide, it’s about 15-20%. Utah is about 6%.

And, so, we get some bad raps, but in the same token, we really do a lot with less.

I wanted to talk to you a little bit about some things, but first, I want to kind of give you a disclaimer. I am not standing here to defend the legislature and everything we’ve done in public education - because quite frankly - I haven’t agreed with everything.

A good example of that is the labor union bill that went through the legislature last year.

Sometimes we’re the majority, sometimes we’re the minority. I’m not here to defend everything we’ve done.

A little history, for what the state has done in education. 

The total of all funding - that is both local, and state. Primarily, since the 1920s, public education in the state is funded by both the state and local, and income tax. What money we do collect goes back to the district. The rest of the property tax is the local basis, but the income tax is all funneled through the state.

If you look at the total of all funding, in the last 10 years, appropriations have doubled since 10 years ago. For a total of $4.3B dollars. So the state portion, and the funding in the last 10 years, has also doubled for a total of increase of $2.95B per year. That’s per year.

All funding has increased 36%, or $2.3B in the last five years, and state funding has increased 46.4%, or $1.87B in the last 5 years. State funding has increased 58.4% or $2.18B in the last 6 years. Notice in the last, if you look at the column for enrollment, you can notice in the last 3 years, we started to see a slight decline in student growth across the state.

For many many years, one of the main things we funded in the state was student growth. Now I know that Iron County is an outlier there, because we’re growing.

Even though statewide, we’re seeing a slight decrease in enrollment, I know you’re not seeing that in Iron County.

Let’s switch to the Weighted Pupil Unit.

So the WPU is the basing funding mechanism for public education. That’s the amount that is allocated per student through the state.

It’s steadily increased over the last 15 years. It went from $2,577 in 2010 to $4,674 today. And it’s increased over the last 10 years.

So every year, the legislature sets a WPU increase. And that is one of the main funding items in the last 5 years especially – it’s been the very first thing that we identify. So Utah does a lot of unique things with budget, one is a base budget, in that we have a base budget that we pass the first two weeks of the session, so that if all Hell breaks loose at the end of the year, we’ve got a base budget that we can go off of.

That came from when Walker was the Governor, and she had a favorite reading program. She told legislative leadership, that when we get that budget, “if the reading program isn’t in the budget, I’m going to veto it.” At the 11th hour, they almost walked away without a budget – but they got the reading program in and she passed it. Since then, we implemented the “Base Budget Process”.

Going forward, the government can stay in business if all things didn’t work out. In the last 5 years, we started doing two things:

1. Funding student growth when it’s there
2. Setting a base amount for the WPU increase.

If you look at that, the increase has been at an average of 4.22% per year.

Now lets go to the other document – additional state funding items. I want to talk to you about some of the additional things that we’ve done over the past few years.

There’s been a conscious effort from the legislature, and the governor, to increase teacher salaries. We knew we were low, and we’ve been successful over some efforts over the past few years – we’re now considered the top starting teacher salary in the intermountain West.

Prior to FY2024, there was a teacher salary supplement of $4,200. It was implemented per teacher. The catch was that it wasn’t indexed. There was a bucket outside of the WPU. So in FY2024, we doubled that to $8,400 per teacher. Now, the way that came about, and it was a controversial bill, you could call it the “Scholarship Bill”, the “Voucher Bill” – it was a part of that bill to have people to tie onto and vote for it – I was opposed to the voucher side, but I’m also very pro-teacher and pro-education, so I used some leverage and said, “Okay, if we’re going to do this. We need to index it.” And so, Steve Lund and I ran a bill separate from that – to index, not only the second $4,200, but the first $4,200. So now that money will grow at the same rate of the WPU for the teachers. So that’s a significant thing.

In FY2025, we also did another $1,000 per teacher to the supplement.

So if we think about funding education, one of the reasons you’re here tonight, is because of equalization. And that’s not all of it, but part of it at least.

So what that means is, you have counties that have a diverse ability to raise taxes at a local level - because the legislature expects the local community to help fund public education. And so, you look at certain counties - like smaller counties like Garfield County, +90% of that county is federally owned. And so they don’t have the ability to raise a lot of money. We don’t have the ability to tax it.

They could tax 5,000% and still not have enough money to build a school.

But as you look at equalization – look at Park City; they’re flush with money. High property values, high incomes. I think we’re kind of in the middle somewhere. Those are some of the challenges.

My first year in the legislature – the biggest most controversial bill was the Public Education Equalization bill – trying to level the playing field. It’s controversial because you’ve got winners and losers – we’re taking from some, and giving to others.

So, sometime ago, the legislature decided that the state would set a benchmark for the districts. To follow to prove the local communities are doing their part to fund public education. If the district voted and the board levies generated less per student than the state guarantee rate, the state makes up the difference.

So if you just don’t have the ability to get it up there or do your job to get it up there, the state will kick in and bring it whole.

To qualify, the districts must levy up to 20 tax increments, or .002, a hold harmless period was set for 5 years - but in practice is actually 6 years - but it’s kind of a leeway for the districts to soft-pedal into it.

That had been in place for some time, and I will tell you that many districts had been working on that - some districts not at all. Some districts in between.

In 2025, HB2, the Public Education Appropriation bill, changed the hold-harmless period from 5 years to 1 year, or in practice – it’s actually two years.

I’m not going to necessarily defend that and say it was the best thing we ever did, but that was the thought process and policy. So if the legislature is the bad guy in this, I’d say yeah, in that sense we are, because we changed the hold harmless period.

You have choices. You know, we have choices as a community. As a “district”, I include us as citizens and you as a school board - we have choices. And those are things that we would hope you represent us and make those decisions. I think that that’s kind of where we’re at with trying to help you understand what we’ve done for public education, and what’s going on a little bit - and I know that representative Shipp and I – we’re not here to influence the decision.

We’re simply here to provide some information, and give you the information you need, as our representatives, to make a decision for the majority of those you represent.