By Kellen Olshefski
Editor
At its annual meeting Monday night, community and board members in attendance voted in favor of a resolution setting the school district’s 2016 tax levy at $18,825,012.
Despite the district borrowing about $20.4 million for capital projects district-wide, the result of a referendum passed in April, Elkhorn Area School District Business Manager Bill Trewyn said this actually represents a 1.52 percent decrease from last year’s tax levy.
“I think this is big news that we’re not projecting an increase at all, in fact we’re projecting a decrease in the tax levy, and that’s with the referendum being passed,” Elkhorn Area School District Administrator Jason Tadlock said.
While assessed valuation is unknown and the district won’t know until October, Trewyn said the budget was pieced together with the idea the district’s assessed values will remain practically the same.
As a result, this year’s mill rate comes out to $10.75 per $1,000 of assessed value, meaning community members owning a $100,000 home for example, can expect to pay about $1,075 for the school district’s portion of the tax bill.
Trewyn said the 2015-2016 tax levy is in part due to a number of reduction efforts, including reducing staffing through attrition, a one-year reduction of the annual maintenance budget due to the referendum, the elimination of a one-year supplemental textbook budget from last year for the new math curriculum, reducing student contact day and thus reducing transportation costs, and saving on district health insurance, about $400,000, simply by staff participating and excelling in health and wellness programs.
As for notable expenditures in the coming year’s budget, Trewyn noted the addition of a speech pathologist in the district, continued expansion of the STEM and Project Lead the Way programs, administrative support for the district’s OPtions program and continued allocation of resources to the district’s Olweus bullying prevention program, set to be implemented in full this year.
Trewyn said overall expenditures and revenues will essentially remain flat this year, due to the revenue cap remaining flat.
Trewyn’s budget presentation Monday night covered a variety of topics including enrollment, the revenue cap, how Elkhorn compares to other districts and the district’s proposed tax levy.
For the complete story, see the July 30 edition of the Elkhorn Independent.
