When is a tax break, not a tax break? When the Erie School District decides that they want to take your long talked about and not yet delivered tax break and spend to repair and replace dilapidated schools!The subject of more special sessions of the State Legislature than you can shake a stick at, school property tax relief is supposed to come in the form of monies generated by the gaming revenues. Depending on your tax bill and school district, the tax reduction was supposed to average about $150.
Now comes word that Erie Superintendent Dr. Jim Barker would like to fill a proposed budget shortfall and pay for a bond issue to be floated for renovation and repair work to the district’s school buildings.
So far the District school directors appear split on seizing the money to pay for the multi-million dollar shortfall and bond issue. Like so many other government spending plans, it seems only a matter of time before they all get together, throw up their hands and announce how hard they tried to fight it, but they just had to push through the tax increase because their was no other way to get the renovations paid for.
How about a silly little concept like proper maintenance? It’s amazing how many local school districts have utilized local Parochial school building while they do repair or replacement work. Many of those closed down Catholic School buildings are in better shape than the newer public school buildings that are being replaced!
The main difference is the Parochial system understands they have tightly limited resources and need to take care of things, unlike the public system which can just increase your taxes or seize your tax relief! Can’t wait to hear about the plans for some high tech or green friendly facility that Erie taxpayers will be stuck footing the bill for!
5 comments:
exactly. nothing more to say.
I am curious about the following part of you piece:
". . . Many of those closed down Catholic School buildings are in better shape than the newer public school buildings that are being replaced!"
What is the source for that statement? Where does one find that kind of information?
Doc, you may find this hard to believe in a day and age where we form a blue ribbon panel to contemplate our navel lint, but I made that comment based solely on my experience of visiting various public and parochial schools what I saw with my own two eyes!
The Parocial system knows that they aren't likely to be building new buildings any time soon so they actually take care of what hey have!
I've had public school administrators and school board members tell me that they have stopped doing even basic maintainance on some building to cut costs and to push for new facilities!
It would help sometimes to give some numbers to examples like that. I thought it was an interesting observation but then wondered if was based on actual data or just a guess. You would have a more powerful argument if you could back it up with something like ‘60% of the Erie school district’ or ‘of X number of schools visited”, etc.. As it stands, you could be basing your thoughts on a visit of 2 or 100 schools. I think your commentary would have more bite if you backed it up with some hard numbers.
Didn't realize the Erie School District had 100 schools?
I base my comments on this topic like I do on most others...upon common sense!
At one time or another I have been in 5 or 6 of the city schools and probably 3 or 4 of the Parochial Schools and based the comments on what I observed of the conditions of the buildings and classrooms during those visits.
Uniformly the Catholic schools where clean and appeared to be well maintained.
As to the city schools probably 60 percent had very evident problems with the physical facilities internally.
No I didn't crawl around on the roofs, or check out the boilers...based simply on what I could observe.
Hope that brings you the statistics and clarity you desired Doc.
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