When faced with the choice between losing educators or securing more funding, some Utah school districts are picking the latter.
This year, 14 districts are asking to raise property taxes. At least six of them have cited changing demands in employee compensation as a motivation.
Box Elder School District is asking for more than $11 million of additional annual property tax revenue, which would increase the tax rate by almost 25%. District Superintendent Steve Carlsen said they need the funds to catch up with the pay offered by nearby school districts, an area where they have fallen behind.
“We do not like the fact that we're placing, you know, more burden upon our taxpayers, especially our homeowners,” he said. “We just felt like we needed to do it to keep Box Elder in a competitive market for great teachers because great teachers, as we know, help kids be successful.”
Utah’s public schools are funded by a mix of federal, state and local funds. The state distributes money to individual schools based on enrollment, while each district’s board of education determines how much it needs from property taxes.
Because Box Elder has fewer students, they don’t get as much state funding as nearby urban districts. Box Elder County is more rural, Carlsen said, and has fewer businesses, which are taxed more than residential properties. He said their schools have lost faculty and staff in the past few years to districts offering higher pay.
“The only way we can solve it right now is to go to our folks and try to be as kind as we can, yet do what we need to do, hopefully, to help our employees,” Carlsen said.
Tax revenue is one of the only options to solve the problem, said Billy Hesterman, president of the Utah Taxpayers Association. Rural districts, he added, are in an especially rough spot.
“We do have a problem that students in our state, some portion of their education, the quality of it is being determined by where they live instead of by, you know, how good they do and how good of a teacher we can hire,” Hesterman said.
Some urban areas need help to keep up with the competition, too. Provo City School District is looking at a 5.47% property tax increase. According to the district’s website, neighboring districts can offer higher pay to first-year teachers, and the difference widens as their career goes on. Provo plans to use the extra revenue to ensure “retaining the best teachers is possible.”
“We're now having a, maybe, correction in the market of people saying ‘This is how much I'm willing to work for to be a teacher,’ and the taxpayers are having to cover it,” Hesterman said.
Hesterman said he hopes to work with lawmakers and policymakers to equalize funding differences. Until then, Carlsen said Box Elder will have to raise more tax revenue to ensure the county’s children can have the same quality of education as other parts of the state.
