Why the Millage Deserves the Support of All Kalamazoo County Voters, Including Those Who Do Not Have Students in the Schools
Why should voters who do not have students in the schools support this millage?
The most important argument is that the millage will help improve the quality of life and economy of the greater Kalamazoo community.
The spending due to the millage has some immediate positive effects on the economy. Teachers and other school employees spend money at a variety of local retailers and in the housing market. This spending will help create jobs in other sectors of the Kalamazoo economy.
(Of course, both the extra taxes and spending due to the millage must be taken into account. However, the positive effects of the extra spending on demand for local goods and services will be greater than the negative effects of the extra taxes, as virtually all the extra public spending is local spending. This is a well-known effect in local public finance that is taught in economics courses as the concept of the “balanced budget multiplier”. A paper by Tim Bartik and George Erickcek of the Upjohn Institute shows how this argument applies to public spending and taxes in Michigan. See http://www.upjohn.org/Michigan_budget_release.pdf )
The more important effects of the millage on the local economy are long-term. We live in a economy with increasing global competition. In that competition, one of the key advantages of the Kalamazoo area are our strong local educational institutions. We have a major state university, a well-known community college, good job training programs, and good local public schools.
The Kalamazoo Promise has attracted national attention to the educational assets of the Kalamazoo area. This had led local economic developers and local governments to center much of their strategies for Kalamazoo’s future success around promoting the Kalamazoo area as the “Education Community”.
A strong local educational system helps attract both households and business to the Kalamazoo area. There is ample evidence from numerous studies that better local public schools increase local property values.
A failure of the millage will lead to large budget cuts in local public schools. These cuts will make it difficult to maintain current educational quality. A millage failure will certainly make it difficult to promote Kalamazoo as the “Education Community”.
Local school districts are currently actively pursuing various reform efforts to improve the quality of public education. These include reforms to meet Michigan’s new, more stringent graduation requirements for all students. In Kalamazoo Public Schools, we are engaged in a variety of reforms to try to make sure that all students are able to fully take advantage of the Kalamazoo Promise. This requires that all students not only graduate from high school, but graduate with high enough skills to be successful in college. All of these reform efforts will become more difficult to accomplish if local school districts, due to a failure of the millage, are forced to cut services to students.
Reforms to increase graduation rates, and improve the quality of high school graduates, affect the quality of life in our community. We know that high school graduates with good skills are not only more likely to succeed in college, but also more likely to be employed, more likely to earn good wages, less likely to become involved with crime, and less likely to have other social problems. Everyone in Kalamazoo gains if our labor force and population has more of these positive attributes.