New opportunities for citizens to participate in the initiative financing of the budgets of secondary schools

The subject of the study is the state of financing of Russian schools. The purpose of the work is to identify opportunities for individuals and legal entities to participate in the financing of secondary schools. To ensure the competitiveness of Russian higher education, it is necessary to create a solid foundation for secondary education so that school graduates have the highest basic education, so that families do not have to bear the huge costs of additional private education in grades 10 and 11 (tutors and additional courses in preparation for the Unified State Exam) to successfully pass the final exams. To improve the quality of secondary education, it is necessary to massively and point wise finance targeted school projects. The article considers the problem of finding sources of financing for initiative budgets of secondary schools. The main drawback of the existing experience in financing initiative budgets in the Russian Federation has been identified, in which the final selection of projects for implementation and the final decision on the amount of allocated funding does not take place at the school board level (as it should be in accordance with the fundamental principles of initiative (participatory) budgeting, but at a higher level — as a rule, by a commission of officials the subject of the Russian Federation in which the school is located. The experience of Germany in terms of the organization of targeted transfer to secondary schools of financial resources received in the form of taxes from specific individuals and legal entities based on the taxpayer’s choice is considered. It is proposed to provide school initiative budgets with their own sources of financing, independent of the decisions of executive authorities, based on two ways for parents of secondary school students to transfer part of the amount of parental income tax to the income part of the initiative budgets of schools where their children study, thanks, firstly, to modification of the existing tax deduction for education, bringing its size up to seven times the amount of parents’ expenses for transferring money to the initiative budget of the school; Secondly, the permission for parents whose income is more than 5 million rubles per year to direct, at their choice, part of their income tax (levied at an increased rate of 15%) in a targeted manner to the initiative budget of the school where their children study. The economic effect of both methods is calculated using the example of one school.

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