YOUR LETTERS: Missouri must invest more in education

The 2024 Legislative Session is underway and one of the first big issues to come up is education funding. After 20 years of Republicans controlling the legislature, Missouri’s schools are underfunded, understaffed, and many are underperforming.

What happened? About 20 years ago, Republicans gained control of the legislature and started to decrease school funding levels by hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

As a result, Missouri now only spends about eight percent of its state budget on the foundation formula, compared to about 14 percent 20 years ago.

Because of these funding cuts, Missouri has the lowest paid teachers in America which has led to a teacher shortage crisis across the state.

Meanwhile, Missouri’s public schools now receive a greater share of funding from local sources than state sources. In fact, Missouri ranks fourth in the nation in percentage of local revenue for public schools and 48th in percentage of state revenue for public schools. That means the vast majority of school funding is on the shoulders of local taxpayers like you, because the state has failed to step up.

That is why I am so strongly opposed to legislation that was brought before the Senate Education Committee last week that would have diverted even more money away from our neighborhood public schools by handing out vouchers to parents to cover their kids’ private school tuition.

Each year, vouchers already divert about $10 million away from Missouri’s neighborhood public schools – where most Missouri students attend. Expanding vouchers to take even more money away from our kids and classrooms is a bad idea and I will continue to oppose it.

We must invest more in our local schools, including providing our teachers with a long overdue pay raise.

In 1996, the average pay gap between teachers and other college graduates was around six percent. Today, it is over 26 percent. States like Iowa and Arkansas have raised their starting teacher salary up to $50,000 a year, and Missouri needs to raise teacher pay to stay competitive.

SEN. DOUG BECK
MO Senate District 1