Here are comments from Cary School Board President Scott Coffey on Governor Bruce Rauner’s State Aid to Education changes:
I do have some very high level take-aways from the Amendatory Veto by Rauner.
In general, I’d conclude that Rauner’s adjustments are primarily focused on impacting Chicago in the new funding formula.
The TIF EAV change hurts Chicago the most.
It looks like McHenry County only has about $22 million in TIF EAV or 0.2% of the total.
Most districts would see a minimal impact.
Although, Fox River Grove D-3 may take a hit due to the relatively high percentage of the village’s EAV is recognized as TIF.
Eliminating the regional wage rate differential factor hits Chicago.
The biggest problem with SB-1 that I’ve written about before is that it sets up to re-distribute the wealth once the Hold Harmless provision sunsets.
I’m not sure how long past the next year, if at all, SB-1 ensures that a district won’t go down in funding.
Rauner takes it to 2019-2020 and then establishes the new hold harmless level on a per-pupil basis.
It protects suburban districts and negatively impacts districts with declining enrollment resulting in a reduction in the Hold Harmless funding level. (i.e. Chicago).
As to the pension changes, there are a lot of moving parts.
And I’m still trying to understand it all.
Clearly, there’s a negative impact to the CPS pension funding.
But the interesting components revolve around adding an incremental 2% pension cost to hiring new employees and he cut the language preventing a future pension cost shift to the local districts.
That could have all kinds of interesting impacts on districts’ decisions in the future.
The Illinois Policy Institute also has articles on these topics.
It is helpful to get the perspective of a school board member who looks into the issues.
The problem we are going to be running into is a shortage of what taxpayers believe they should be paying in taxes.
There is only so much kick the can, hide and seek, catch me if you can that can be done.
At some point the trick bag is empty.
Mr. Coffey, the salvation for taxpayers of your district came only after a prior profligate school board and administration had stripmined district taxpayers for all possible public money, and the State of Illinois was about to step in by law to salvage remains.
In Woodstock D200, we are well along in progress toward a similar end (hope we can survive double digit property tax rates along the way). We hope we will have a good outcome such as you have made possible in your taxing district.
My question is, why are school financial profile scores lacking the metrics which might protect taxpayers from profligacy or deliberate financial exploitation by their own school taxing body?
Why aren’t significant unreported accruing financial obligations such as OPEB a metric to be considered, for one example?