DAPHNE, Alabama – Two years to the day after the first informal gathering of the county’s educational enrichment foundations, the group they founded held their first countywide education summit Friday. The Baldwin County Education Coalition welcomed nearly 300 guests to Trojan Hall at Daphne High School to listen to a series of speakers discuss the school system’s challenges and aspirations.

The half-day program featured a comparative practice study and student achievement data presented by Dr. Joe Adams of the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama and a 50-minute presentation on the state tax code by Susan Kennedy, manager of education funding and revenues for the Alabama Education Association. Mark Edwards, superintendent of Mooresville, N.C., Graded School District, rounded out the summit with an overview of his system’s “Digital Conversion,” which is being used as the basis for Baldwin County’s “Digital Renaissance” program.

Kennedy, whose presentation elicited several audible reactions from the audience, outlined the problems funding education in a state where, in 2008, 1,761 companies doing business in Alabama reported almost $412 billion but did not pay any corporate income tax. Sixteen of those companies reported revenues of over $1 billion each. Kennedy said that from 1970-2010 the state has virtually paid the same per student on education.

“Tax systems should really look like you did it on purpose,” she said. “Your tax code should look like somebody was thinking about it. Unfortunately, Alabama’s tax code is really random and inefficient.”

Kennedy showed how the lowest 20 percent of income earners in Alabama, those who earn around $10,000 per year, pay 10 percent of their income while the highest one percent, or those who earn more than $1 million, pay four percent.

“At the AEA building, a great cheer went up when you passed the one-cent tax,” Kennedy said. “There are some failing schools in Alabama. Sometimes the community failed first, and then it showed up in our schools. We can’t ask out schools to be our answer to many of our community’s problems.”

Kennedy said the AEA is lobbying for new legislation to close loopholes that allow corporations to shift revenue earned in Alabama to states that don’t tax it.

“Everybody likes to talk about common sense, but it’s really important that some common sense get applied to that,” Kennedy said. “The best thing we can do to create jobs in Alabama is to fund our schools.”

Edwards said Mooresville’s digital conversion, which abandoned textbooks in favor of laptops and online lessons, led his school district to improve graduation rates from 77 to 95 percent in a four-year period since 2006. He said it costs about $1.25 per student per day.

“It’s not complicated,” Edwards said. “If students are engaged in meaningful work, if they are active in what they are doing, if they believe what they’re doing is helping them individually, they are less likely to get in trouble, more likely to come to school and more likely to be excited about what they are doing.”

Baldwin County Superintendent Dr. Alan Lee used term he borrowed from Evans to describe the Digital Renaissance now underway this county’s schools. “We have a moral imperative to teach 21^st century skills,” Lee said. “In 40 years of education, the one thing I’ve seen that makes a true difference in what children learn and how they learn and the depths to which they learn is the digital conversion in Mooresville and the digital renaissance in Baldwin County.”

BCEC spokesperson Denise D’Oliveira said the coalition is optimistic about the school system’s aspirations and expects to keep it accountable through four key areas of work: engaging, expecting, advocating and delivering. The group has already issued two progress reports on school funding, data driven accountability, leadership development, college and career readiness and effective communication, and promises to release more on a bimonthly basis.

“These publications, today’s summit and all the ways in which we’re monitoring progress demonstrate one of the Coalition’s most important roles, to serve as the accountability mechanism for delivering on the public’s expectations for reform,” D’Oliveira said.

She asked the audience to “be intentional” about participating in education.

“We’ve got to continuing growing the Coalition both inside and outside the schools system. It is the only way to lay the groundwork for long term economic, civic and social prosperity.”