Should Teachers Have to Panhandle to Prep for a New School Year?

Back to school! These three simple words used to leave America’s public school teachers giddy with anticipation. Now they leave them opening up their wallets and worrying.

The problem? Teachers have been spending out of their own pockets for generations to decorate their classrooms and the like. Now they’re having to spend their own money for basic school supplies — everything from pens and pencils to cleaning fluids — or go without.

One national study last year by Scholastic and YouGov found teachers spending an average of $530 a year on classroom supplies. The number of teachers who spend over $1,000 out-of-pocket, adds a National School Supply and Equipment Association report, has doubled over recent years.

In Oklahoma, third grade teacher Teresa Danks has been spending $2,000 annually of her own money. Earlier this summer, with her school district facing a $10-million budget cut, Danks actually started panhandling. She took to a busy street corner with a simple hand-made sign: “Teacher Needs School Supplies! Anything Helps.”

Many passers-by did help. But the fiscal squeeze on America’s local public school budgets and teacher wallets is now threatening to get even worse. The nation’s big-box retail giants — the places where many teachers go to buy school supplies — have unleashed a fierce lawsuit offensive that aims to significantly lower their local property tax bills.

If corporate retail powers like Home Depot and Target succeed in this greed grab, the state comptroller in Texas recently warned, local public schools in his state alone would lose $1.2 billion “annually within five years,” with another $703 million in school funding lost from the state level.

Some context: Home Depot profits last year jumped nearly 14 percent to $8 billion. Home Depot CEO Craig Menear took home $11.5 million.

Why do CEOs like Menear make so much? Let’s give them some credit for creativity and chutzpah. In their new property tax-avoidance offensive, an Education Week report details, retail CEOs have their lawyers making the astonishingly audacious argument that “the massive stores they operate ought to be appraised as if they were vacant.”

This ridiculous “dark store theory” has been winning lawsuits in Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin, and school districts in the Midwest have already lost millions of dollars in revenue. In some cases, court rulings have actually forced local governments to reimburse big-box retailers for the higher property taxes they’ve already paid.

The new attack on local public school funding isn’t just coming from brick-and-mortar retailers. Amazon, the nation’s online retail king, is taking new steps to avoid taxes, too.

Amazon has been working, over recent years, to reposition itself as a responsible corporate taxpayer. The company now collects sales tax on the Amazon goods online consumers buy. These sales taxes show up on the bills of consumers who live in states that impose sales tax obligations.

But Amazon is only collecting sales tax on about half the goods that people who click onto Amazon buy. The half of sales that go through the third-party vendors the Amazon site spotlights are still going untaxed.

The state of South Carolina is demanding that Amazon end this tax avoidance and pay up nearly $12.5 million in uncollected taxes, penalties, and interest. Amazon is disputing the South Carolina claim, and the case is going to the courts. All the big online retailers will be watching closely. A South Carolina victory could mean higher tax revenue nationwide from most all the big online retailers.

All these big-time retailers can afford to pay higher taxes. Our biggest retail empires, after all, have already made their emperors into some of the world’s richest people. The chief executive of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, now holds the third-largest individual fortune in the world.

The largest family fortune in the world, meanwhile, belongs to the heirs of the founder of Walmart, America’s biggest brick-and-mortar retailer.

Panhandling Oklahoma teacher Teresa Danks says she’s “tired of not having enough funding for our classrooms but being expected to always make it happen.”

The super rich who run retail in America could ease that fatigue. They could start paying their taxes.

Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, co-edits Inequality.org. His latest book — The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970 — traces how average Americans ended the nation’s original Gilded Age. Follow him at @Too_Much_Online.