By Aaron Ilia Merritt

Why do we have to pay taxes for our schools, and then on top of that pay extra fees?

It is public school isn’t it? It seems to me that a lot of the tax payers’ money is spent on useless things such as iPads that seem to be used as much as a white crayon. So who is in control of school budgeting? How do schools get funded?

Contrary to popular belief, schools are not funded solely on their students’ test scores, but rather on a complex formula calculated by the state and federal governments. Many things go into this formula that are very hard for someone who is not in education or government to understand.

The Jeffco Public Schools has tried to implement a system in which the principal of a school has more control over a school’s funding. When talking to Principal Griff Wirth about school funding, he informed me of something called a negative factor. A negative factor occurs when the district promises a school a certain budget but cannot fulfil that budget to the school so the school has to run under budgeted.  This is where schools and districts look to extra fees to pay for things that the shorted budget cannot cover.

Parking passes are district mandated not school proposed.

“Parking passes are a fee that the district charges, and it goes into a fund that they have a district level to maintain parking lots,” said Wirth on parking passes.

The parking lots up in the front of the school and the junior lot are kept up to a higher standard than the lower free lot because of the subject.

Why are lunches so over-priced? “There are a lot of hidden costs,” said Wirth.

When we look at it from a student standpoint, we see that $3.25 for eight pieces of pizza comes out to $26.00. A pizza from Black Jack is only about $12.00 That seems to be a $14.00 profit per pizza, but the hidden costs, such as wages for cafeteria workers, come into play and there is little to no profit made on school lunches.

The school also buys new technology every few years to keep up with the curve of growth. Some of the technology is bought using taxpayer money, but the big chunk of it is paid for by fundraising, such as the Farmers 5000.

My opinion has changed dramatically. I now see that fees are vital to running a school successfully. I am very grateful that our school has what it does and that the fees are kept to a minimum.