Citizens Fight for New Methods of School Funding

By DREW TEAGLE

     When watching Marna Evans carefully examine a stack of newspaper clippings at a table in Lane Public Library, one thing sticks out about her demeanor.

      She is determined to fight for her cause.

     She comes to the library in a manner of true professionalism. Her one-inch thick folder of news stories, political advertisements, and editorial pieces is just one example of her commitment.

      As a co-founder of Citizens for Fair Taxation, an activist group that meets in Collinsville, she speaks out for reform of the state’s educational system, which uses property tax to pay for school funding. She is winning her battle in Oxford. As a resident of the mostly rural Milford Township, Ohio, Evans lives on 75 acres off State Route 73, and she can see firsthand the heavy burden placed on residents of her community by property tax hikes.

      “We will continue to fight the property-tax system until a new system is put in place,” Evans said. The Ohio Supreme Court ruled the current system unconstitutional in 1997 in the DeRolph school-funding suit, named after Perry County student Nathan DeRolph. But the Supreme Court has washed its hands of the case, saying that a solution is the responsibility of the executive and legislative branches of the state government.

     The Citizens for Fair Taxation, or CFT, began when Evans and two other local residents got together after each writing a letter to local newspaper editors regarding the current school-funding system.

     “While we were only three concerned citizens at first, we now see anywhere from 30 to 100 attendees at our meetings,” Evans said. The group has met twelve times since their inception at the Collinsville Community Center.

     Evans’s work has not slowed since the defeat of the most recent Talawanda school levy on February 4th. Since then, she has continued to lobby for reform of the unconstitutional system, working closely with similar groups across Ohio. She has worked to bring state leaders, such as former Governor John Gilligan, to the community to address citizen concerns. He brought a somewhat divisive message to CFT’s last meeting. While he commended the group’s efforts to bring about reform, he cautioned that voting down levy after levy only hurts the children of the district.

     While Evans agreed that schools in the district need serious revamping in both the physical structures and the realm of academics, she dislikes the notion that her organization is somehow anti-children.

     “People think we are just a bunch of retired people or farmers who don’t care about the educational well-being of kids in the district,” she said. “Nothing could be further from the truth, and we resent that implication.”

      CFT is made up of mostly senior citizens from the surrounding townships, but they have young members as well. Evans said that it was more difficult for their younger members to speak out against school levies because they currently have kids in school, and it is hard to ignore the disrepair of schools in the district. She has compassion for these parents, and for the first time, she breaks her determined demeanor to shed some emotion on the issue.

     “The schools in the Talawanda district should never have been allowed to sink to their current condition,” Evans said. “But we will continue to fight for a system that spreads the burden instead of isolating it on the land owners.”

     While the surrounding townships are overwhelmingly against the current school-funding systems, many residents of Oxford look past the issue and want the schools to improve, whatever the cost. With such a divide in opinion among residents of the school district, Evans, who serves as the unofficial president of CFT, knew that her organization would have to work hard to get their message across to local residents before they went to the polls on February 4th.

     “We are really a grass-roots organization,” she explained. “We put full-page ads in the Oxford Press and Miami Student, and our members went out into the community with our message.”

     One member of CFT works as a night watchman at Dittmer parking lot, and he would take any opportunity to talk with Miami University students about the school-funding issue.

     “We also had John Schmitt putting in a great effort by handing out leaflets to students Uptown and answering any questions they had about the issues,” Evans said. “We urged Miami students not to vote because they would not pay the taxes that were being voted on, but we still feel it’s important for them to understand the issue.”

      Evans feels that splitting up the district is not the answer to the problem and reform on the state level is the only feasible alternative. She hopes the Blue Ribbon Committee commissioned by Governor Bob Taft to study the school-funding issue will be fruitful.

     “I hope they don’t just throw money at (the issue) and work to find a solution,” Evans said.

     A degree of animosity exists between voters in the surrounding townships and Oxford voters. Many citizens in the surrounding townships think the district is geared too much to Oxford and Miami University, and many also feel personally slighted by Oxford voters.

     “They have always seemed to look down their noses at our rural communities,” Evans said.

     However, Evans conceded that for any long-term solution, citizens of Oxford and the surrounding townships must work together.

     “We’re going to have to get together at some point,” she said.