There’s more to the funding formula discussion

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To the Editor:

There is so much more to the story than the select board’s lack of involvement in the high school’s funding formula saga. As I understand it, the initial funding, when the district was created, was through two mechanisms: capital costs and operating costs. In 1989 Amendment II created a new protocol for funding, providing for both operating and capital costs to be funded based on each town’s enrollment. It would be useful if we knew why. Perhaps your reporter(s) could dig into this history.

As for digging in, your reporting counterpart in Edgartown described Oak Bluffs as “digging in” when it offered a separate response to the MSBA. A member of that Edgartown Select Board once said “That is never going to happen” in response to discussion of alternative funding mechanisms at one of the many meetings organized by some (not all) towns’ finance committees, I think in 2019. I attended many of those meetings and saw, over time, an awareness by others of the Oak Bluffs position on the formula: some of the participants could also see how their towns are impacted similarly by the enrollment based formula for capital costs. It may help now to publish some of the charts presented at the February 25th meeting.

Finally, to respond to the headline of the first letter in the Feb. 3 paper: The funding formula is a basic part of the school capital project. Towns other than OB will be impacted, just not to as great a degree.

Maura McGroarty
Oak Bluffs