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School District to Propose 13 Cent Tax Increase

July 22, 2008

The Cedar Hill I.S.D. Board of Trustees could vote as early as this month on a proposed 13 cent tax increase. If it passes, it would go to the voters in sometime in October for approval.

The City Council met with the school board to discuss the issues and asked some direct and tough questions.

In 2006, the Texas Legislature passed comprehensive school finance reform. I wrote about this plan back in 2006 as the negotiations were raging.

In a nutshell, the plan called for reducing a school district’s M&O budget from a cap of $1.50 to $1.00. At the time most districts, including Cedar Hill, chose the “Golden Pennies,” raising the M&O tax rate to $1.04.

In exchange for the reduction in revenue, the Legislature promised new monies to schools in the form of teacher raises, teacher performance incentives, and 1 billion over three years to reform Texas high schools.
You can read Gov. Perry’s press release of May 16 2006 here.

But Cedar Hill has not seen any of that money.

Mike McSwain, the Director of Finance for the district, did a good job explaining the situation.

Schools receive money from the state based on a standard called the “Weighted Average Daily Attendance” or WADA. Essentially, this is how much the state thinks it should cost to educate each student in the district.

When a city’s property values increase so that the district would collect more than their set WADA, the excess is given to the state to support the “Robin Hood” program.

So schools don’t get the benefit of a healthly local economy. The only way to get more than the WADA, is to raise the tax rate.

The additional 13 cent tax increase would amount to about $4.7 million dollars to the schools.

This would help pay for some basics that have been deferred from prior budgets. It is also the first step in bringing the schools inline with the vision the school board and the citizens of Cedar Hill have for our schools.

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