AFT Comments to LSCS Board of Trustees -- May 2018

AFT Comments to LSCS Board of Trustees -- May 2018

John Burghduff, LSC Faculty

May, 2018 – Tax Rates


Good evening. I am John Burghduff representing the American Federation of Teachers

At the April Board of Trustees meeting faculty senate president Dr. Anthony Carrera from Kingwood finished his speech to the Board by affirming his support for taxes.  Board Member Dr. Kyle Scott followed up by asking him, and all of us really, what he believed was the correct balance between taxes and tuition in funding Lone Star College.

This is a difficult philosophical question that has a very real impact on Lone Star students and district citizens.  As everyone here tonight knows, the three main pillars of community college funding in Texas are state allocations, local taxes and student tuition.  The state expects Texas public colleges and universities to increase the number of degrees granted by 1.7% per year to reach a goal of 550,000 college degrees in 2030.  However, every session, the legislature cuts the percentage of higher education costs the state will cover.  Unless there are dramatic changes in state leadership, that trend is going to continue.

Therefore, unfortunately, the ever-increasing costs of educating more of our fellow Texans fall at the feet of our local tax payers and our students to ever higher degrees.  Dr. Carrera confessed that he did not know what the proper balance was between local taxes and tuition. We, in the AFT don’t know the answer to that question either.  However, we have some thoughts to consider regarding one of those sources.

According to the Texas Association of Community Colleges, Lone Star College’s property tax rate of 10.72 cents per $100 of valuation places us 44th among the 50 reporting community college systems.  For years, we have taken our low tax rate as something to boast about and we have systematically lowered that tax rate many times.

Fiscal responsibility is obviously a great virtue but, over the years, that frugalness has hurt us.  For example, before Dr. Head became chancellor, Lone Star had fallen to second from the bottom among Texas community colleges on percentage of classes covered by full time faculty.  Fixing that one problem is very, very expensive.  Now, facing the enormous physical damage from Hurricane Harvey and the drop in enrollment that has followed, we are faced with the prospect of cutting class sections for fall even while we need to grow.

Across the state, the average tax rate is about 18.06 cents per $100 valuation.  This is approximately what our neighbors at San Jacinto College levy.  If Lone Star charged the state average tax rate, our property tax revenues would increase by over $123 million dollars.  What would the impact on a typical tax payer be?  For a house valued at $200,000, property taxes would increase by just over $12 per month.  In terms my freshmen students could relate to better, that’s three grande lattes per month at Starbucks.

Is that too much to ask? What if we only raised the tax rate to the “roll back” rate?  This is the rate above which citizens could petition for a tax roll back election.  According to the Lone Star College website, that rate would be 11.37 cents per $100 valuation.  That increase would cost the home owner described previously only about $1 extra per month and would bring the college an extra $11 million dollars per year.  This rate would still put us substantially below the rates levied by our friends in the Dallas, Alamo, Tarrant County and El Paso community college systems.

We live in a time when, for some political demographics, the reaction to any hint of a tax increase is a knee-jerk no.  Yet most of the citizens of our district recognize the incredible value Lone Star College brings to their families and their communities.  We believe that they can be convinced that it would be worth $1 a month or maybe even a latte . . . or two or three.

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More information on the Board of Trustees, including meeting dates, are found here.

Hungry Students, the Union, and the College's Responsibilities

A recent article in the Texas Tribune showed nicely how the increasing cost of Texas state college tuition is affecting working-class students. For example:

A student today would have to work 62 hours a week at a minimum wage job to cover the full cost of attending a public four-year college, according to research from Trellis, a nonprofit that tracks student debt issues.

We should not be surprised with these numbers nor are we surprised that the State of Texas government continues to ignore the relationships of poverty in Texas, access to higher education, and health in our communities' families (for more data on poverty in Texas, see here). All student costs are increasing, while local household incomes are stagnant. Here, we focus on food costs for student college students:

Source: Trellis Company

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates the minimum dietary needs of an adult can be met on $267 per month provided that all food is prepared at home, an unlikely scenario for young adults. Many of our Lone Star College students, however, do not have sufficient employment for even $267 per month and many of those students actually bring their income back to their families collectively (this is another blog post, forthcoming). Many students live in areas where they cannot find jobs; other jobs struggle with transportation, course demands, jobs, and family responsibilities. In short, our students are hungry. That hunger is both a distraction, but cognitively affecting academic performance.

• 36 percent of university students were housing-insecure in the past year, as were 46 percent of community college students.
• Less than half of all students surveyed reported being completely secure, meaning they did not experience any food or housing insecurity, or homelessness, in the past year.
• Black and Native American students were more likely than non-Hispanic white or Asian students to experience food or housing insecurity.

We applaud our faculty colleagues who bring food to their offices, to the classrooms, to writing centers and other places for students to grab an apple or snack bar. Students are amazingly grateful for these gifts from faculty pockets. But colleges must realize that these students' hunger immediately and directly affect the college's success.

Houston Community College aggressively addresses hunger and we recommend the Tribune's summary and Houston Chronicle's recent attention to this too-silent discussion. We also applaud LSC-Montgomery's years of food pantry experience and LSC-North Harris's student emergency fund and emerging food pantry program. BakerRipley, partnering with East Aldine Management District and local churches, are aware of these food insecurity concerns.

But the college must be much more aware and assertive in addressing this long-term and persistent community problem.

We propose this in three prongs:

1. Each college should make their campus as centers for research of food in the communities, including food deserts, poverty, and student family access to nutritious food. 
2. Each campus should connect with current community resources for food banks.
3. Use the college's political influence to address these concerns at the legislative level, including decreasing tuition and fees. 

Readers, union members, and allies should address this with their union representatives and their Professional and Support Staff Associations and Faculty Senates. Academic departments should address this concern as part of their curriculums [sic] as community problems worthy of intellectual inquery. 

Additional Resources

Trellis Company. "State of Student Aid and  Higher Education in Texas." 2017. https://www.trelliscompany.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SOSA.pdf  

U.S. Department of Agriculture. "Official USDA Food Plans: Cost of Food at Home at Four Levels, U.S. Average, June 2016." (http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/USDAFoodCost-Home.htm);