If you want more funding for Idaho public education, this achievement is welcome news

Reclaim Idaho’s apparent success in securing enough signatures to get the Quality Education Act on the November ballot is a victory for Idaho voters.

The citizens initiative, if officially certified in the coming days by the Idaho secretary of state’s office, would give voters an option of raising income taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals to raise money for public education — an estimated $323 million.

We are not quite prepared to give this initiative our full endorsement. We will spend more time looking at the details and interviewing others in the know before we make our recommendation, but we will do so before the November election.

We would much rather see tax policy and education funding handled through the legislative process. We wish we could rely on the Idaho Legislature to do the right thing and make more significant investments in public education.

But the Republican-dominated Legislature has not proved to be reliable or responsive, necessitating a citizen initiative.

As we’ve reported many times before, Idaho’s per-pupil funding continues to be the lowest in the nation. Dozens of Idaho school districts operate on more than $200 million in supplemental levies. Idaho teacher pay lags behind neighboring states.

Idaho has made some gains, and as Idaho Gov. Brad Little has pointed out, the last legislative session’s $258 million, or 12.5%, increase in public education funding was “historic.”

But Idaho is still trying to catch up from historic budget cuts from the Great Recession. Part of this year’s increase also went to fund all-day kindergarten, which Idaho should have been doing years ago. And $100 million of this year’s increase went to raising teacher salaries, which only partially makes up for the fact that average teacher salaries have fallen since 2009, according to the Idaho Center for Fiscal Policy.

Plus, rather than really make a truly bold and historic investment in public education, Little and the Legislature have prioritized tax cuts over students, including $600 million last session.

The state of Idaho is projecting to end fiscal year 2022 with a $1.3 billion budget surplus, according to the Idaho Capital Sun.

It would be tempting to dismiss Reclaim Idaho’s ballot initiative in November and wait until the next legislative session, hoping that the lawmakers get the message and use that budget surplus to make significant increases in public education funding.

But Idaho’s Republicans have not done it so far; we have little assurance that anything would change come January.

Still, there are questions to be answered.

We are squeamish about raising the top income tax bracket to nearly 11% for income $250,000 and over and the corporate tax rate to 8%. We would like to see a fuller analysis of negative impacts or unintended consequences of those hikes. We also remain concerned about the possibility of using the funds generated by the initiative to simply replace existing funding, and we noticed a discrepancy in the tax bracket language that needs to be clarified.

For the time being, though, the mere fact that the Quality Education Act is on the ballot is a feat in itself. Volunteers spent months gathering more than 100,000 signatures from at least 18 legislative districts, as required by law. Reclaim Idaho said it collected signatures from all 44 counties in Idaho.

If officially certified by the secretary of state, it appears that it will be the only one of a half-dozen or so proposed initiatives to make it to the ballot, a testament to the high bar set by Idaho’s existing law on citizen initiatives.

Just getting it on the ballot sends a clear message that increasing public education funding is important to Idahoans, similar to when Idaho voters passed Medicaid expansion after the Legislature failed to do so for several years.

Passage in November would send an even clearer message — and a mandate.