If you are a teacher that is worried about losing your job at the end of the school year, state School Superintendent Joe Morton has some good news for you. He announced Monday that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 will save about 3,800 teacher jobs this year.

We’re glad that is going to happen. Alabama has made some great strides in education over the last few years, but a staff cut would hurt those strides tremendously.

While it is great that we are getting the stimulus to help offset our losses from sales tax revenue, we may need to look at the underlying problem of our school funding. When you rely on a volatile sales tax for education, you’re going to go through periods of proration. In good years, you can increase the budget while you have to decrease the budget in bad years.

What we must do to make sure education in our state stays stable is to fund education with stable taxes such as property taxes. That’s the only way we can make sure education stays steady.