Schools stand to lose promised funds
Carla Gwaltney Owens Sentinel writer

If North Carolina's Governor has his way, North Carolina schools will lose money promised to them when the state passed the lottery in an effort to provide funds for education. And because small rural schools like Clay County are already receiving only a small piece of the lottery pie, their plates will be even emptier under the governor's proposed budget for the next fiscal year.

According to reports presented by Clay County School Superintendent D. Scott Penland during Monday's school board meeting,

Governor Easley's proposed 2007-2008 budget takes lottery money away from schools and converts it to prize money in an effort to boost lottery sales which have been lack luster.

In a statement from The North Carolina Education Coalition which Penland provided to school board members, the coalition states that Governor Easley is "breaking the Education lottery promise before the lottery is even a year old."

Penland commented that small, rural schools like Hayesville are already being short changed when it comes to lottery funding due to the way the lottery money is distributed by the state with large, city schools receiving the majority of the funds produced by the lottery. Although these larger systems will be hit the hardest under the Governor's proposal, Clay County would stand to loose a portion of the $100,000 which it receives from the lottery. Penland said he has been told that approximately 10% of the allocation would be lost, or about $10,000. Although it may not seem like much, that's $10,000 that won't be there to pay a bill, Penland commented. For a small school system every dollar counts.

State legislators like Rep. Roger West and Senator John Snow, who represent rural North Carolina communities, have been trying to get the North Carolina Legislature to re-visit the issue of how lottery revenues are distributed among school systems, hoping to get rural schools a bigger piece of the lottery pie.

Sen. Snow told the Sentinel in an interview on Tuesday that he has co-sponsored a bill in the Senate that would re-allocate state lottery revenues based on a per pupil rate alone. Currently the revenues are distributed based on a school's student population and the average property tax value. This formula, according to Snow, penalizes school systems with lower property tax rates like systems in Western North Carolina, the Piedmont area and several coastal counties.

Snow said 49 communities do not get their fair share of the lottery pot under the current formula, while the remaining 51 communities come out veryfavorably.

To show how serious he and fellow legislators who represent those 49 short-changed communities are, Snow pointed out that his bill to re-allocate lottery funds is second on the list of bills to be introduced in the senate this session. He added that the only reason that it was not the first bill introduced was because the first bill is required to be about senate rules.

Snow said that the entire Western delegation, Democrats and Republicans, are working together to see that the lotteryallocation is changed.

"We are presenting a united front," Snow commented. "We are trying to get that money balanced out. It needs to be allocated more fairly. And we will keep trying to gt this done." Snow added that this is one of his main priorities this session.

As far as Governor Easley's proposal to take some of the lottery revenue from education and use it to increase prize money,

Snow said that he thinks that it's too soon to make such a change. Snow said that he originally supported the lottery to stop the bleeding of money over the state's borders to other state lotteries like Georgia. "We were losing $250 million out of our state to other lotteries," Snow commented.

Snow said he saw the lottery as a way to keep that money in the state and help education. However, he added that he has never seen the lottery "as an answer to all our school ills."

Snow said that he is not concerned about the short fall in the lottery revenue and said he thinks that the state should wait a little longer before they make any changes like the Governor is suggesting. Snow said he would give it a few more years to see if lottery sales increase before taking money from education to increase prize money.

"I'm not sure if his idea is a good idea or not, but personally, I would wait a little while to see what happens. I'm not alarmed by the fact that projected revenues weren't met. And I didn't expect (the lottery) to be an instant answer for education."

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