In many schools, notebook paper isn't the only kind of paper students must bring to class. Cash poor schools that can't afford even basic supplies ask their students to bring paper towels, tissues, copy paper and even toilet paper.

   In some schools, math and science textbooks must stay in classrooms because there aren't enough to go around to all the students. Even in class, students must pair up or huddle in groups to share books.

   Candy and Christmas gift wrap sales are common tools to raise money to buy books for the school library or replace broken playground equipment. Schools ask parents to pay extra fees for labs and elective classes. At some high schools, foreign languages and advanced placement and honors classes are beyond reach.

   Lines for lunch start forming before 10 a.m. at some school cafeterias too small to handle all the students during lunch time. Meanwhile, leaking roofs go untended, broken plumbing sits unrepaired and even blown light bulbs aren't replaced because some schools can't afford routine maintenance, let alone costly repair jobs.

   In far too many poorly funded schools in Alabama, school officials are forced to focus on making do and getting by. That job becomes much harder when the schizophrenic sales tax revenues schools depend on so heavily nosedive, as they did this year, setting off proration.

   Blame an archaic, diseased state constitution that values sheltering special interests more than it values the education of young people.

   Our 100-year-old state charter vests the power of the purse strings with the Legislature in Montgomery, demands only nominal local support for education, grants special interests tax exemptions that cost schools hundreds of millions of dollars a year and places a plantation-era stranglehold on local school districts' ability to raise the tax revenues needed to adequately fund schools.

   The constitution doesn't stop there. It earmarks all but a small percentage of the dollars from the state for teacher salaries and peels away millions for legislators' pet projects. It leaves school systems helpless against mandates the state doesn't fully fund. And it magnifies the problems of proration, the nasty surprise funding cuts required by the constitution when tax collections fall short of expectations.

   With these constitutional shackles, Gov. Don Siegelman's effort to improve education in Alabama will get about as far as an escaped prisoner in leg irons. There may be some small strides, but any comprehensive effort to make schools better will remain a prisoner of the 1901 Constitution.

   These constitutional chains aren't there by accident. Their roots go back to the framers, whose purpose was to protect the wealth of the landed gentry and large landholding corporations. They succeeded in making it exceptionally hard to fairly tax land and other real property.

   Over the years, special interests such as the Farm Bureau protected their constitutional turf like bulldogs, exerting control over the Legislature to get what they wanted. Alfa's fingerprints are all over the "lid bill," which caps property tax increases and sets up a gauntlet for those brave enough to attempt to raise property taxes. Same goes for "current use," the constitutional amendment that allows millions of acres to be taxed at only a fraction of their worth.

   Is it any wonder Alabama's property taxes are the lowest in the nation? That you could double them and they would still be lower than the next-lowest state, Mississippi? That because there's so little local-funding support for education, the state's per pupil spending consistently ranks in the bottom five nationally?

   The constitutional bar for local funding is set extraordinarily low. The equivalent of 10 mills in property or sales taxes or other revenues is all that's required. Yet, 10 mills doesn't go very far, producing less than $100 per student in some school districts.

   For those districts that want to do better, the constitution lines up a series of hoops they must jump through, with legislators as ringmasters.

   Just like Alabama counties, which lack what's known as "home rule" power to make important decisions, school districts lack the ability to raise the tax revenues they need.

   To obtain a property tax increase, a district must hold a public hearing and get the consent of the local legislative delegation. Then it must get the Legislature to OK a bill calling for a vote on the tax increase. Finally, a majority of voters in the district must bless the measure in a referendum.

   That last part can prove insurmountable. Voters, many without children in their public school system, regularly turn thumbs down to raising their taxes to pay for school improvements. Nearly two-thirds of all tax votes fail, according to the Alabama Association of School Boards.

   Some communities, though, have chosen to pay higher property taxes. Mountain Brook, Vestavia Hills, Homewood and Hoover, for example, are the best funded school systems in the state. Each city taxes its property at more than three times the state minimum. Is it any wonder they all have had a lock on the top spots in the state in practically every conceivable ranking of student academic performance?

   Because the constitutional restraints designed to keep property taxes low work so well, schools must rely on other sources of revenue. By far the two biggest sources in Alabama are sales and income taxes. The state constitution, in fact, earmarks all but a tiny percentage of the money from the state's 4-cent sales tax and 5-percent income tax to the state education fund.

   That formula leaves schools dangerously exposed to the elements of the economic cycle.

   In good times, sales and income taxes can produce the money schools need to keep up with inflation and to pay for new programs, buildings and other new costs. But when the economy hits a trough - as it did in the last quarter of 2000 - these taxes come up short, sucking the education budget into a maelstrom.

   By forsaking stable property taxes and making schools dependent on the ups and downs of sales taxes, the constitution has struck a perilous deal with the devil.

   Take Mobile County, for example. Proration of 8 percent would mean the state's largest school district will have to cut $19 million this year. But from where? Teacher salaries can't be cut and the district already has stretched its dollars to the limit. Borrowing money, laying off teachers this summer and putting off buying new textbooks are about the only real options, and none is in the best interest of children.

   A constitution that protects the wealth of the powerful, handcuffs schools' ability to get the money they need and locks in spending that prevents schools from addressing their most critical problems says a lot about a state's priorities. Throwing off the shackles of a 100-year-old constitution would send the message that those priorities must be changed.

   Alabamians are a good people who cherish their children. We need a constitution that does the same. By forsaking stable property taxes and making schools dependent on the ups and downs of sales taxes, the constitution has struck a perilous deal with the devil.

Next: Hogtied, Handcuffed

Reprinted with Permission from The Birmingham News.