As enrollment falls and the cost per student rises, the Whitehall School board is proposing to spend $500,000 on building improvements, the Whitehall Times reports.
The fact that is not really presented in the article is that, if undertaken, the project has already been paid for by the taxpayers.
This is how the school board does it:
The budget is consistently over estimated and excess taxes received are deposited in “reserve accounts” after approval by the voters. The voters have never been asked, as long as I can remember, if these excess funds should be returned to the taxpayers and the next year’s budget never seems to reflect the overcharges from the prior year. Projects are then proposed where the state reimburses a percentage of the amount expended and claims are made that it will not effect the budget. That’s because we’ve already been overtaxed. When the state reimburses where does the money go? It goes back into the reserve funds.
Governor Patterson made note last year of the large amounts of reserve funds many school districts, like Whitehall, are holding.
In the last couple of years, we’ve added a large addition to the school, added tennis courts to the school, refurbished the pool, refurbished and added a new roof to the gymnasium and now we are proposing to refurbish the auditorium. All the while, enrollment is plummeting and costs per student are rising because of falling enrollment. When you see the school board holding special elections in the middle of winter, you can surmise that their budget excesses where better than they had forecast and they either want voter approval to spend the excess or put in into reserve accounts.
Keep an eye on the propositions that the school board puts forth in May. Excess money that they want approval to put into reserve accounts comes from our checkbooks that they have overcharged.