York Public Schools remains extremely concerned about our over-reliance on local property taxes to fund our annual operations. We have been vocal about our concern for several years and, as a result, co-founded “Nebraskans United for Property Tax Reform and Education” with the intent to further the dialogue and pursue legislative action to remedy the issue. We have been working with elected officials for a few years on this important topic and appreciate their efforts and input along the way. We are hopeful that a new bill drafted by Senator Tom Briese’s office, with support from “Nebraskans United for Property Tax Reform and Education,” will gain traction and help move us closer to a legislative solution of this complicated issue.
The following data points clearly illustrate we have a school funding problem despite some saying that high property taxes are due to excessive school spending.
• Nebraska K-12 schools receive 49% of their funding from local property taxes while the national average is 29%. Over 68% of our 2016-17 funding came from local property taxes!
• Nebraska K-12 schools receive 33% of their funding from state sources while the national average is 47%. Just under 17% of our 2016-17 funding came from state sources.
• YPS has 6.5 fewer teachers and 16 fewer support staff members than we did in 2007 despite seeing an increase in student enrollment.
• YPS has had a 0% spending increase since 2014-15 and just an average annual spending increase of 1.3% since 2008-09.
• Our revenue from state equalization aid has plummeted from $2,214,826 in 2014-15 to a paltry $166,566 for 2017-18 causing an even larger over-reliance on local property taxes. The total revenue we have for our budget has decreased over $720,000 since 2014-15 despite a significant increase of more than $1 million in local property taxes. Again, with no spending increase within that time frame.
It remains our hope that our elected officials will pass legislation in this 2018 session to finally address how public schools are funded. If no legislation comes through this year, a logical next step, though one we don’t want to have to look at, could be the pursuit of a potential lawsuit against the State of Nebraska. Several agriculture related organizations, as well as multiple school districts, are regretfully beginning to explore that possibility just in case. If YPS were ever to consider a lawsuit, we would do so with several other partners to ensure that it would come at no financial cost to us.
Some of the main tenets of a potential lawsuit could center around the following legal points.
• The Nebraska State Constitution requires that the State provide a free and public education to all persons between the ages of 5-21 years.
• While the State can delegate the duty for providing the education to school districts, by doing so, it cannot avoid the obligation to finance the “free and public education” guaranteed by the State with a local tax that does not provide substantially equal revenues for each district.
• Students are denied equal protection in their right to a free and public education across the State and school districts are treated differently and are denied equal protection by current legal funding mechanisms.
• Property owners are also compromised by the property tax methods used to finance public education because this financing scheme, which produces widely varied mill levels from district to district, prevents statewide uniformity and proportionality in the imposition of property taxes.
We remain committed to our students and patrons to pursue all possible actions to find meaningful change for school funding in York and all of Nebraska.
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