Local school districts clash with taxpayer's group
By Mark Raeber
Progress Staff Writer
School officials in O’Fallon have gone on the offensive hosting information meetings to explain school financing in light of allegations of excessive spending from a local taxpayer’s group.
Two O’Fallon school superintendents say their districts can not afford to meet the demands of a local taxpayer’s group and still fulfill their obligations to provide quality, affordable education for students and long-term stability in school financing.
OurTaxMoney.com (OTM) is an organization of local taxpayers asking the schools to give back what they say is a six percent windfall created by the St. Clair County assessor’s application of a property tax multiplier.
Superintendents Darcy Benway, Ed.D., of O’Fallon Township High School District 203 and Nancy Gibson, Ph.D., of O’Fallon District 90 presented their case during the first of four Public Finance Forums they have scheduled to “inform interested parents, employees and community members about the finances of their O’Fallon schools.”
They say the tax group should instead focus on solving tax assessment problems in the county and school funding problems created by the state’s reliance on property taxes.
The May 1 forum at the Katy Cavins Center attracted an audience of nearly 100 made up of school district staff, OTM members and other interested taxpayers. A second meeting was held Tuesday. Remaining sessions will be held at 10 a.m. Saturday, May 10, at the O’Fallon Public Safety Building on Seven Hills Road; and at 7 p.m. Tuesday, May 13, in the multipurpose room at OTHS.
Benway and Gibson began the program by presenting a primer on school funding and their budgeting processes during which Todd Koehl, Ph.D., assistant superintendent at District 90, said administrators there approach budgeting with two goals in mind: to provide the best quality of education for students and financial stability for the district.
Gibson said those goals are necessary and the district is working to meet growing budget demands.
“We get revenue for special education from the government, but still we average $2.2 million in expenses for special education that is not reimbursed. That has to come from our budget,” she said.
“We also have budgeted for an increase power bills of almost $200,000 and we have an escalator clause in our contract with Laidlaw (the school bus company) for transportation and as gas prices rise, so will transportation costs. Those costs already went from $450,000 to over $800,000 in one year.”
Koehl added the other side of the coin is the district’s enrollment has now passed 3,500 students.
“We have grown by 3 percent annually,” he said. “We have enrolled 101 new students since the beginning of this school year. And we have started looking at how we are going to work with 170 new students next year. So we are talking about five classrooms and five teachers.”
School officials are also concerned the state will not deliver the final two General State Aid (GSA) payments promised to school districts this year because Illinois is out of money. At District 203, the loss will total $545,919.56. The loss for District 90 will total $689,555.82.
“We are probably heading for a perfect storm because (O’Fallon’s estimated assessed value) has been climbing,” Koehl said.
OTM group agreed, saying the revenues and expenses over the next eight years will not keep up due to the decrease in state aid and the schools’ spending plans.
O’Fallon’s assessed value is expected to climb beyond $871 million in 2012 causing state aid to local schools to drop to the lowest possible level. Called the harmless point, this level is set by the state as the minimum amount of aid given to school districts based on payments in 1996-1997.
School administrators and OTM members agree the state’s hold harmless should be adjusted upward to the level paid in 2006-2007.
“We recognize the downward pressure coming from both of our revenue sources but we also face an increase in expenditures when we bring on Carriel (the district’s new building set to open in 2009),” Koehl said. “We are tightening to save as much as we can. And we spend out as judiciously as possible the reserves to match the growth.
“The $3 million we carry over in reserves equals a little over one month’s of our expenditures, which are $2.2 million. So our reserve is hedged against a double downward trend in revenues that is coming and an upward trend in expenses.
“If five years from now we are sitting at even, we will be happy. And that is just about where we will be,” he said.
In interviews before the meeting, both Benway and Gibson said their school districts can not afford to give back the money OTM is asking for.
“If we were ever put into a position where we would have to give back that money, we would have to make a lot of cuts to programs just to balance the budget,” said Gibson, noting they are required by law to file balanced budgets.
“OTM has been using emotional and inflammatory words such as windfall,” Benway said. “There may be an increase in local funding but there is a decrease in state funding that offsets the windfall. So the total picture is there is no windfall of money."
At the meeting, Benway presented a list of program cuts she said OTM was seeking. Her list brought a loud response from OTM members in the audience.
Kyle McCarter, a current St. Clair County board member and OTM organizer, said the group has never called for cuts in existing programs and the school districts are simply using the claim as a scare tactic to avoid their responsibility to the taxpayers.
“OTM is asking for each taxing body to reduce its rate of taxation in order to produce a zero dollar increase in taxes this year,” he said. “We do not want any more money than last year to come out of our pockets and go into the government’s pockets. “This does not mean the schools will not obtain more revenue. It does not mean they will have to cut programs. Each district has sufficient cash reserves to enact this. Even if they did not use their cash reserves, it only means they may not be able to add as many new programs and increase their spending as much as they had hoped,” he said.
Benway said she believes OTM’s approach ignores the larger problem of inequity in state funding and how property is assessed in St. Clair County.
“The way Illinois has set up school funding places more of the burden on local property taxes, but there is a problem with property taxes in O’Fallon,” Benway said. “And to solve it we need to take a look at how we are assessing property and make sure it is being done fairly and accurately, so everybody pays their fair share.”
The superintendents said OTM should focus its efforts on the root of the problem, the St. Clair County Assessor’s Office.
There have been no actual assessments of properties in the county for 24 years, even though they are suppose to be done every four years. Instead, a multiplier is imposed year after year and raising the taxes of some residents beyond the actual value of the homes being taxed.
The school superintendents also said during their presentation they would gladly work with OTM to attack the underlying source of the school funding problem — the state’s reliance on property taxes to pay for education.
Even before her arrival in O’Fallon in April 2005, Gibson had been very active in efforts to convince the Illinois General Assembly of the need to reform the way the state funds schools.
At the time, she said she hoped to interest local school districts in joining the lobbying effort. She even invited representatives of a Chicago tax reform group to a community meeting here in October 2005 to discuss proposed solutions to reform school funding.
At the May 1 meeting, she and Benway said they would work with OTM to push legislators in Springfield from the grassroots level to find an equitable solution for funding schools and to give property tax relief to homeowners.
“A bill to revamp state funding has been put on the back burner in Springfield,” noted Gibson in referring to SB2288, the most recent school funding reform measure being considered by the General Assembly, that has been sitting in limbo since March.
