York Public Schools has been working with other school districts and various organizations on various ideas for property tax relief, additional revenue streams for schools, etc.
I personally feel that school districts are wearing a huge bulls-eye right now with lots of lawmakers yelling for reduced spending, less taxes, etc. but they don't see the whole picture; which is "total revenue" that school districts have to work with.
Using YPS as a small example, our total state revenue totaled $5,356,167 in 2008-09 and declined to $3,551,808 in 2013-14. Our total federal revenue dipped from $1,380,076 to $819,172 at the same time. All in all, over that five year span, our state and federal revenue dropped by a combined total of $2,365,263.
During that same time span, our property taxes skyrocketed 34.6% from $6,472,903 to $8,717,649 for an increase of $2,244,746 which is still over $120,000 LESS than what we lost in state and federal revenue.
Many see school districts as "out of control spenders" and that couldn't be farther from the truth from what I see. In fact, my oldest daughter and I studied annual financial report data of over 55 schools last month and found out that a little over 75% of them grew their annual budgets over the last 5-year span by LESS than an average of 1.8% each year. York, and several others actually averaged LESS than 1% spending growth each year.
We take property taxes very seriously and we're trying to do our part to come up with potential resolutions. If you have any ideas, please share them.
Go Dukes!
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