“We don’t write to defend the status quo,” the letter says. “Real property tax relief must involve Ohio stepping up to fund public education, just as 44 other states do more effectively.”
Districts across the state are sharing similar messages.
Beavercreek City Schools Superintendent Paul Otten said there is “a lot of frustration” as most of the tax reforms proposed at the state level affects public education.
“The purpose behind this letter is we want to make sure our residents know, ‘Hey, we agree with you,’” he said. “We don’t like taxes any more than anybody else and we would love to have some common sense approaches to this.”
Administrators argue that state-level policy changes have shifted the burden of school property tax further onto homeowners. In 1991, homeowners and farmers paid 47% of school property taxes, and today they pay nearly 70%.
“While states nationally fund about 45% of education costs, Ohio now funds only 33.5%,”administrators wrote. “We’re not overspending—Ohio ranks 20th nationally in per-pupil spending. We’re simply being forced to fund education through your property taxes instead of state resources."
The Ohio legislature earlier this month overrode a line-item veto by Gov. Mike DeWine, enshrining the elimination of a school district’s authority to levy fixed-sum emergency, substitute emergency levies, and combined school district income tax and fixed-sum property taxes, among other things.
Otten said this directly affects a levy Beavercreek has on the ballot this November that supplies $18.5 million of the school district’s budget, which is a renewal of two levies (originally approved in 2001 and 2003), combined in 2010.
Because it was approved by voters prior to 2013, the district receives a 12.5% rollback for its residents, Otten said. If the levy failed in November, and would have to be put on as a new levy in May, this rollback would be eliminated, Otten said.
Others in Ohio politics have pushed back against school districts in the property tax debate. State Rep. David Thomas, R-Jefferson, who is leading the Ohio House’s property tax reform efforts, previously told this newspaper that schools across the state are overly reliant on property taxes, and should be asking voters for income taxes — along with property tax cuts — instead.
“I always caution folks, when we talk about the state, that we taxpayers are the state,” Thomas said. “When folks say, well the state should fund schools — there isn’t a magic money tree that is the state. It’s us as taxpayers.”
In the letter, school administrators urge their constituents to call state legislators on the topic.
“We spend more time today advocating with our legislators than we’ve ever done in the past,” Otten said. “We don’t disagree that tax relief is good, but what is happening is we are seeing tax relief being placed on the shoulders of our students.”
The letter is signed by the superintendents for all seven Greene County public school districts (Beavercreek, Bellbrook, Cedar Cliff, Fairborn, Greeneview, Xenia and Yellow Springs) as well as the superintendents of the Greene County Career Center and the Greene County Educational Services Center.
Ohio’s byzantine school funding model was declared unconstitutional 30 years ago. This year, voter frustration over rising property taxes has led to a flurry of proposed reforms at the Ohio legislature.
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