From: "lee gilliland" <leeandalexis at hotmail.com> To: WSFAlist at keithlynch.net Subject: [WSFA] Re: West Virginia Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 18:09:56 -0500 Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net> Let's try it one more time, and PLEASE READ THIS. IT WAS A RECOLLECTION OF WHAT I HEARD AS A 12-YEAR-OLD. It was talk. Period. Adults yammmering while kids are at talbe. With cousins. Turkey dinner. PICNICS IN WET TENTS.\ OK? ----Original Message Follows---- From: Kit Mason <kit at hers.com> Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net> To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net> Subject: [WSFA] Re: West Virginia Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 18:06:45 -0500 Candy Madigan wrote: > > At 11:00 AM 04/04/2002 -0500, you wrote: > >The City also draws vast numbers of tourists who spend money and pay lots = > >of sales tax. Hotel tax: 15.25, general sales tax: 8.25% > > > >& try using the sidewalks in December. > > > >I sorta doubt the 92% figure. > > I don't. NY is a large state, but not very populous once you get outside > of NYC. Most of the taxes my in-laws pay go to support NYC. I also doubt the figure. I spent ten years as a newspaper reporter in upstate New York, (1970s-80s) most of the time covering education and local government -- which includes school budgets and the ways they are calculated, as well as the kinds of aid that are given to small cities, towns and villages. The proportion of aid that went upstate overall as compared to into the city varied at every level, but at none of them did it approach 90 percent. Without extensively reviewing the two-foot stack of clippings I kept from my work, I would estimate something closer to an average of 60 percent went to New York City, based not only on population but on fairly complicated formulas that included evaluations of infrastructure and specific levels of local municipality sharing of costs. State aid for education across the board (k-12. all districts) covered between 40 and 60 percent of a school's cost for educating a child -- the actual amount that was spent depended on the property value of the school district as compared with all other school districts (you don't really want me to provide the entire formula, trust me), but also changed somewhat when applied to a city school district as opposed to a central school district as opposed to a union free school district. Thus, the majority of farm districts with low property values received a higher percentage of their running expenses from the state than did districts located in suburbs or areas with expensive vacation homes (whether they were occupied all the time or not.) The school district that received the least aid for the entire state was (and probably still is) Chautauqua Central School District, which is a rural farming district that also contains one square mile of the most expensive land outside Manhattan -- Chautauqua Institution, a cultural and vacation resort. Because of that land, Chautauqua gets less per capita aid than anywhere else, including the South Bronx (or whatever other school district you name.) The per capita nature of the aid is a major reason why public schools campaign so hard against "school choice" referendums that would pay for students to go to private schools; at the time I covered education, the per capita rate for small cities was on the order of $3,500 a year (base rate not counting special programs). This was also in a small city school district (Jamestown, NY) where the starting pay for a full-time teacher with a bachelor's degree was $16,500 a year. The district had about 280-300 teachers, with the highest pay level for a tenured teacher with 25+ years as about $56,000. The specific state tax money for education at that time came from sales tax more than income tax. Federal aid to education, k-12, was largely confined to picking up much of the cost of school buses, Head Start programs, and very occasionally health care services (some immunizations, I believe, were done at schools at that time, though I'm not entirely sure about that.) Outside of education, much of the tax money that went to NYC at that time came in the form of federal funding for housing, infrastructure and other matters that was administered by state agencies and state programs. Administration of programs probably came out of the state pocket, but the money within the programs did not, overall. Kit -- kit at hers.com Kit's Concatenation: http://concatenation.blogspot.com/ A Twist of Wry -- http://www.mrks.org/~kit/index.html Kit's Works -- http://www.kitsworks.com/stories/index.htm _________________________________________________________________