EDUCATION: SCHOOLS DON'T KNOW WHAT THEIR PAYOFF IS FROM LOTTERY

Lottery players in Cape Gir-ardeau County spent more than $4 million on scratch off and other games of chance last year. Players in Scott County chipped in about $2.6 million.

School officials in both counties, however, would be hard-pressed to say what type of return they've received on the investments from their communities.

"I haven't seen anything to cross my desk," said Cape Girardeau School District business manager Rob Huff.

"I've never seen anything that's clearly marked proceeds from the lottery," Scott City School District Superintendent Roger Tatum said. "No one knows how much we would get, if we're getting anything."

The Missouri Lottery has transferred $11.7 million in proceeds to public education, about 30 cents from a dollar spent on lottery tickets last year. Since 1993, the proceeds have been earmarked solely for public school districts, state schools, and public colleges and universities.

Unfortunately, no one seems to know how much school districts benefit from the program.

"We're trying to look at different ways we can better inform our players where lottery money goes, because it's a question that arises," said Missouri Lottery representative Shelly Perez. "We also want to make sure we aren't making it look like we're the cure-all for education."

Perez said lottery proceeds cover 3 percent of public education funding.

While it sounds like a lot of money to the average resident, "it's not a lot of money when you talk about billions of dollars," she said.

Officials with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education said the money is difficult to track because it is not distributed evenly to school districts.

Money meted out

The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education receives a little less than half of the lottery proceeds, with the remainder going to fund higher education.

Rather than inserting the funding into the state Foundation formula used to calculate state aid on a per-pupil basis, the funding is meted out to about 15 different programs, including transportation, gifted education, special education, the Safe Schools Initiative and a variety of grant programs.

The large number of lottery-funded programs make it virtually impossible to say with accuracy how much lottery money a school district receives.

"I can give you the big picture, but I can't give details," said Dale Carlson, the department's director of school finance. The impact on schools depends on whether they participate in those particular programs.

"To the extent that they participate, they're going to see some benefit in lottery proceeds," Carlson said.

The department's chief budget officer, Shari LePage, said it's likely every school district receives some lottery proceeds because the bulk of it is used to reimburse districts for bus transportation.

But, she said, simply tracking a district's participation in a lottery-funded program won't give an accurate accounting of the lottery proceeds.

"The problem is that the funding may not all be lottery proceeds," said LePage. "You could make a supposition that a percentage of what they're receiving is lottery."

Newly elected state Rep. Jason Crowell, R-Cape Girardeau, said suppositions could be replaced with exact amounts if lottery proceeds were distributed on a per-pupil basis.

He advocates a plan to allow school districts to use the additional lottery funding where its needed most instead of sending the money to "the districts that have the best grant writers or the districts that are the first to get a new program up and running."

In addition to increasing funding to schools, the plan also enables the state a way to track the lottery proceeds, Crowell said.

Need to know portions

Tatum said it would be beneficial for school administrators to know what portion of lottery proceeds their districts receive.

The Missouri Lottery has been a hot topic since voters approved it in 1984, and their intent has always been to improve educational funding at the state level, he said.

"If truly, there are proceeds from the lottery going to every school district, it would be a good idea to let us know how much we are getting so that we could tell our people," Tatum said. "I think it's something that would be of great interest to our voters, especially if ticket sales in our county are that high."

Another concern school administrators have regarding lottery proceeds, he said, is whether it's being used to offset the funding allocated from the state's general revenue fund to support education.

Although state allocations have increased in the past six years, the overall percentage of funds designated by the General Assembly have been reduced.

In 1993, a year before lottery proceeds were earmarked for education instead of going into the general revenue fund, the state provided 65 percent of educational funding. In all but one year since then, state funding has comprised a smaller portion of the total funding.

LePage said she can't say whether lottery proceeds are displacing funding the state would otherwise supply to cover educational programs.

"General revenue has increased since 1993, and our lottery and gaming has gone up somewhat," she said.

The question isn't has revenue increased, but has it increased enough," LePage said.

Perez said lottery officials are aware of some school districts that have been unable to win voter-approval of funding measures because voters wanted to know how the lottery proceeds were being distributed.

The Missouri Lottery Commission's responsibility ends after the money is turned over to state education departments, she said.

"No programs are being shortchanged unless that's happening on the general revenue side," she said. "It never was intended to take away local responsibility, nor was it intended to offset the state's responsibility for education.".