Saturday, September 7, 2024
SPRINGTOWN — Springtown Independent School District’s board of trustees adopted a balanced budget and tax rate for the 2023-24 fiscal year during the Aug. 28 board meeting.
The new tax rate is $0.9578 per $100 valuation and is made up of a maintenance and operations rate of $0.7575 and an interest and sinking rate of about $0.2003. Because of a decrease in the maintenance and operations rate, the 2023-24 total tax rate is about 18.5 cents less than the previous year’s rate of about $1.143.
“That’s huge; that’s unheard of,” SISD Assistant Superintendent of Business and Finance Wesley Thomas said about the property tax decrease. He added that district officials are pleased to have proposed such a significant decrease.
SISD has been able to lower its tax rate for almost 20 years in a row, Thomas said during the Aug. 28 meeting, even though people’s tax bills don’t always reflect a decrease.
“It's because those appraised values are outpacing the rate that we can decrease,” he said about why property owners see higher tax bills. “As a district, we have no control, no say, no input, no power, no nothing over the appraised values. We can't control them. The only thing that we can propose that we can control from the board’s standpoint, from the district is the tax rate.”
Though SISD’s tax rate is decreasing, the district will still receive more tax revenue than it did in the previous year because of growth and appraisals, Thomas said.
“Obviously the reason being we've got more students; we need more teachers,” Thomas said about SISD receiving more revenue.
The 2023-24 budget includes pay raises for teachers, librarians, nurses, and counselors.
“The SISD Board of Trustees has always done everything fiscally possible to reward our staff and remain extremely competitive in regard to teacher and staff compensation, and this year is no different,” SISD Communications and Marketing Director Kendra Hutchison said. “Even with the current level of uncertainty, we are extremely proud to announce that our Board of Trustees unanimously approved a 3% raise to the teacher, librarian, and nurse pay scale during (July’s) board meeting. The board also approved a 3% raise to the counselor pay scales during (the Aug. 28) meeting. This is obviously exciting news, and we are thankful for the hard work of the board to make this happen for our teachers!”
Following closed session on Aug. 28, the board unanimously approved a $1 per hour pay raise for paraprofessional and hourly employees as well, Hutchison said.
“Once again, this is extremely good news, and this feat was completed through the hard work and dedication to our employees by many business team members and through the dedication to our staff by our Board of Trustees,” Hutchison said.
During the Aug. 28 meeting, Thomas gave a presentation to the board and public on the tax rate and budget. SISD’s total expenditure is more than $53 million, with most of that going to compensate staff. Thomas pointed out that more money was allocated to transportation costs to reflect current higher costs for vehicles and gas. He also said $5.8 million has been directed to maintenance and operations to aid infrastructure needs.
“We know some of our buildings are aging,” Thomas said. “We know we have infrastructure that's going out so we're going to go get ahead of that.”
When discussing the school district’s revenue, Thomas said SISD is expecting to collect about $1.2 million more in local taxes in the 2023-24 fiscal year compared to the previous year.
“Obviously, you see all the house tops that are going in; you see the population growing in Springtown, so therefore the tax base is growing, so therefore the collection rate is going up,” he said.
Almost half of revenue is expected to come from local taxes, and state funds will make up the remaining revenue that’s not supplied locally, Thomas said. The state is expected to pay more revenue to SISD this year because of school tax compression legislation. Depending on the outcome of this November’s constitutional amendment election, Texas school districts would receive about $7.1 billion to lower property tax rates.
