Former Utah legislator: state funding formula leaves Tooele School District among lowest-funded

Howard Stephenson, a former Utah state legislator and long-time school-funding analyst, told the Tooele School District board at a work session that state policy choices have left Tooele with one of the lowest taxable values per student in Utah and a growing gap in per-student funding compared with affluent districts such as Park City.

Why it matters: Stephenson said the imbalance makes it harder for Tooele to pay competitive teacher salaries and maintain instructional programs. He presented state-level data and scenarios that show substantial sums would be needed to bring low-valuation districts up to the levels of wealthier districts.

Stephenson said the 1995–96 decision by the Legislature to cut the statewide basic property-tax levy in half reduced a stable source of school funding and opened the way for widely divergent local levies. “Property tax is the most stable source for funding education,” he said. “To drop the statewide basic levy that far basically made our funding less stable.”

He showed data from the Kem Gardner Institute and the Utah Taxpayers Association indicating Tooele’s taxable value per student was roughly $415, while Park City’s was roughly $9 million per student. Stephenson noted Tooele now has one of the highest local tax rates in the state—about 60.85 increments—yet that rate yields little per student because the assessed valuation per pupil is low.

Stephenson presented three funding scenarios the state could pursue to increase equalization: a modest step to roughly $108 per student per WPU increment (costed at about $359 million from the school fund), a larger step to $178 per increment (about $1.3 billion), and an ambitious move to roughly $271 per increment (about $2.7 billion). He said the state has steadily increased equalization appropriations, but growth among high-valuation districts has outpaced those increases.

On a statutorily required half-percent transfer intended to support local-levy equalization, Stephenson said Senator Fillmore’s 2023 bill would require dedicating 0.5 percent of total WPU appropriations to a local-levy growth account, but that the Legislature has not consistently set aside that amount in practice. “If they were to follow what’s already in statute and set aside the half percent, it’d be about $22,000,000,” he said, noting that amount would be distributed to receiving districts and not taken from lower-need districts.

Stephenson discussed options districts use nationwide to address funding gaps and said many states have seen litigation over adequacy and equity. “Forty-five states, well, it might be 46 now, have had lawsuits,” he said, but he added he would prefer a legislative solution achieved through education and coordinated advocacy rather than a court-driven remedy: “I would like to avoid a lawsuit because I think our problem has been that there hasn’t been enough education of local school boards, of the superintendents and business administrators, but most of all, education of legislators.”

Board members asked practical questions about steps Tooele should take. Board member Todd Thompson asked whether the district should litigate or press legislators; Stephenson recommended an organized, unified legislative advocacy effort led by superintendents and school boards representing the districts that would receive equalization dollars.

Stephenson also emphasized that low assessed valuation per student is often a function of local economic structure rather than household income. “It doesn’t mean that people in Tooele are low income,” he said. “What it means is that the tax base because you are a bedroom community without industrial base, the federal government owns almost all of the county… you just don’t get taxes from that.”

The presentation concluded with board members asking for the slides; Stephenson said he would send them to the superintendent.

What the board discussed next and what it directed staff to do were not formal actions recorded in the meeting minutes; the session moved on to the state auditors’ presentation after questions and discussion.