By Paul EganDetroit Free Press Lansing Bureau

LANSING The election is a week away and depending on which TV ads they watch, voters are either told that Gov. Rick Snyder cut education funding by $1 billion or that he increased it by the same amount.

The claim and counter-claim were made again in ads released by the campaign of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mark Schauer and by the Snyder campaign.

The Free Press has addressed the issue before, but is tackling it once more in detail because the dispute continues in TV ads and various commentaries.

Last week, the Schauer campaign began airing a TV ad titled "Potential," which said, in part: "First, I'll reverse Rick Snyder's billion-dollar cuts to our schools."

The Snyder campaign also released a new ad last week, titled, "Everyone." It quoted the Free Press and other media fact checkers disputing Schauer's repeated claims.

To summarize, Schauer's claim that Snyder cut $1 billion from education is false and Snyder's answer that he has increased state K-12 funding by just over $1 billion since he took office in 2011 is true. But there's plenty more to the story — including the fact that nearly all of the extra money has gone to pay increased retirement costs that school districts were responsible for paying, as detailed below.

The story of the $1-billion cut dates to Snyder's first budget, presented in 2011 for the 2012 fiscal year, in which Snyder recommended cuts to 2012 school aid that the House Fiscal Agency pegged at $961 million. If one uses round numbers and includes cuts in federal school funding, it's accurate to say Snyder once called for a $1-billion education cut.

But the $1-billion cut never happened.

School districts complained, state revenues improved, and lawmakers — with Snyder's support — responded. By the time the supplemental budgets were approved and the numbers were finalized, the cut was reduced to just over $200 million. Cuts to federal stimulus funding of about $500 million accounted for all of that, and state funding for K-12 had actually gone up, from $10.8 billion in 2011 to $11.1 billion in the 2012 fiscal year, which was Snyder's first budget, according to data from the nonpartisan Senate Fiscal Agency.

State funding for K-12 has increased every year since, to $11.2 billion in 2013, $11.5 billion in 2014, and $12.1 billion in 2015, again according to the Senate Fiscal Agency.

But as the Free Press has reported before, of that overall $1.3-billion increase, $883 million went to pay a short-term spike in Michigan Public School Employees Retirement System costs resulting from 2009 stock market losses and a 2010 early-retirement offer to teachers.

State officials don't deny most school districts had less money to spend on other costs, particularly when inflation and reduced enrollment is figured in. The amount allocated for "basic operations" has actually declined by $119 million under Snyder, according to the Department of Technology, Management and Budget.

Some have argued the $883 million shouldn't count, because it couldn't be spent in "the classroom." But school districts had to pay those costs, and teacher salaries and benefits have always been the No. 1 classroom cost.

The state could have used the $883 million to hike the per-pupil allowance and it still would have gone to pay the same expenses. But the money would have been diluted because it would have been shared with charter schools, which don't have the same legacy retirement costs. Instead, the state paid the money separately to only those traditional school districts who faced the extraordinary costs.

Could Snyder have increased K-12 funding more than he did, given that the spike in retirement costs ate up most of the increase? Absolutely.

Commentators such as the nonpartisan Citizens Research Council and Mitch Bean, the former director of the House Fiscal Agency, have argued the amount that could potentially be spent on K-12 schools took a major hit because of actions backed by Snyder — particularly the $1.8-billion tax cut resulting from the elimination of the Michigan Business Tax and the use of about $400 million a year from the School Aid Fund to support community colleges.

"Combined, these decisions have effectively reduced the amount of state resources schools receive," the Citizens Research Council said in an October report.

Contact Paul Egan: 517-372-8660 or pegan@freepress.com