Class Struggle: Fund-Raising Drive For Schools Leaves Manchester Disunited --- A Vermont Town Replaces Taxes With Donations, But Some Won't Give --- `It's Greed, Plain and Simple'
MANCHESTER, Vt. -- Months after her school fund-raising campaign ended, Jenny Davis still sees only two kinds of people when she drives around town: those who donated and those who didn't ante up a dime.</br></br>She knows who's who because the campaign maintains a file on every property owner in town. "There are people who are just freeloaders," says the 38-year-old mother of two. "It's hard to look at those people in the same way."</br></br>School fund-raising in this mountain resort town of 3,600 is anything but a friendly drive for new band uniforms. For parents such as Ms. Davis, it is a crusade to protect the town's children and keep local tax dollars out of the hands of state bureaucrats.</br></br>Manchester's no-holds-barred campaign for private donations to the public schools is making it an unusual battleground in one of America's great debates: what to do about unequal school funding. Property taxes, the main revenue source for local governments, have traditionally provided the primary funding for schools. But since the early 1970s, lawsuits in 45 states have argued that districts where property is expensive end up with the best-funded schools, creating illegal inequality.</br></br>In 20 states where judges have agreed -- and in a handful of others -- legislators have tried to share the wealth. Some states now use statewide property or sales taxes to pay for a greater proportion of their school costs. Others, facing the added pressure of antitax initiatives, cap the amount of local property taxes that a district can raise.