EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of a series of stories examining the concept for merit pay for Oklahoma’s public school teachers.

Oklahoma can’t afford the cost of merit pay for its public school teachers because local tax support for public schools is too low, a member of the House Education Committee said Tuesday.

Norman Rep. Bill Nations, a Democrat, said the state can’t fund a merit pay proposal because Oklahoma “can’t even afford to get teacher pay to the regional average.”

“That’s one of the reasons our teachers are so frightened,” he said.

Nations, along with members of the House Education Committee, spent Tuesday attending an interim legislative hearing on House Speaker Lance Cargill’s merit pay proposal.

The meeting was the second of several meetings planned this fall.

Tuesday, lawmakers heard from representatives of the Oklahoma Education Association, schoolteachers, union representatives from Minnesota and the Norman-based group Professional Oklahoma Educators.

Though most of the speakers urged legislators to bring the teachers’ base salary to the regional level, Nations said getting there would be difficult.

“First we’re going to have to adequately pay all the teachers,” he said. “As long as we’re are losing teachers to surrounding states, then base pay will be a problem.”

But funding future pay increases and providing school districts additional money for operating revenue “will be a struggle,” Nations said because the state’s tax base is too low.

“Here’s the secret that no one in this room is going to mention,” he said. “The fundamental problem is local support for schools in Oklahoma is too low. Property taxes are too low.”

Because the state continues to pick up more of the cost of common education, a greater portion of Oklahoma’s budget is used to fund education, he said. “It’s true. We’re not giving enough money for operational costs. Education funding is too much of a percentage of our budget. Other states have much bigger local support. We pick up what local funds don’t cover.”

And public schools, he said, can’t survive on just local support.

“If we are the bottom two or three in property taxes, we’re going to continue to have problems. But no one is going to alter that — it’s not gonna’ happen.”

Instead, Nations predicted the struggle to fund public schools will continue.