How Can We Make A Change: The School Funding Gap by Lucy

How Can We Make A Change: The School Funding Gap by Lucy - September 2025 Scholarship Essay

Over the years there have been many changes to education, however there are still many things to be remedied in the years to come. A few of the current major issues within the American education system include the following: teacher and staff shortages, growing gaps in students academic abilities, and major gaps in funding for public schools. Unfortunately, these problems within American education may not be solved fully within the next decade, but surely progress can be made.
Of these issues, the most pressing seems to be public school funding and its rapid decline over the recent years that is only expected to continue. The brief article, ‘Save our schools: No more cuts!’, by Ali Smith, Hannah Halbert states, “If public school opponents have their way, Ohio’s public districts will lose $103,388,457 in foundation formula funding over the next two years…” This number alarms many people in the state of Ohio, along with others that are being given similar predictions across the country. These massive decreases in funding will only exacerbate other issues such as the previously mentioned staff shortages and widening academic gaps in schools by taking away funding in areas like staff pay, raises, and bonuses, and special education programs.
So, what are some of the possible solutions to help alleviate this funding gap within the next decade. Well, many of the obvious solutions revolve around taxpayers. Firstly, state income and property taxes could be increased to make more money available for the funding of schools. However, this solution would likely create problems for young people and those beneath the upper class by increasing costs of buying and renting homes and well at significantly decreasing disposable household income. The second way the problem could be solved would be to implement a fairer tax system by distributing tax responsibilities more equally based on monetary class and ensuring a fair distribution of tax-based funds. By doing this, there would likely be a larger disposable income for lower class citizens due to tax breaks, allowing for the economy to grow, and an increase in tax money to the government through upper class citizens, meaning there would be more funding for areas such as education.
Other than taxes, there are other ways that could aid in funding our schools. One of those is Student-Based Allocation, where funding would be allocated to districts based on student financial need. This means schools with a large lower class population would receive more state funding than schools with larger upper class populations where they may receive more private funding and have families capable of providing funding for their children. While this idea is not a perfect solution, as it gives unequal funding without a full guarantee of private funds, when paired with the previously mentioned tax solutions, it could benefit many. On top of this, there are ways to increase private funding to schools that might need it. Some examples include the redrawing of district boundaries to increase revenue in lower income districts, renting school facilities to outside events to bring in money, transparency in school spending to allow the public to see where funds are spent and thus preventing school funds being allocated unfairly, and advocating for student need to increase community involvement and be able to support lower class students.
Although none of these solutions are perfect, they may help facilitate progress in the current school funding gap over the next decade. By using these tools in conjunction with each other, it could be possible to begin the process of erasing this major issue in the American education system.

Work Cited
Smith, Ali. Halbert, Hannah. ‘Save our schools: No more cuts!’ https://policymattersohio.org/research/save-our-schools-no-more-cuts/