Schools' tax-rise ballot set for May

County district seeks state’s OK

The Pulaski County Special School District will ask its voters for a 5.6-mill property-tax increase at a special May 12 election if the state education commissioner approves that recommendation made Monday by the district's Community Advisory Board.

The advisory board voted to support the proposed millage increase, the revenue from which would be paired with up to $20.8 million in state desegregation money to finance a $221 million school construction and renovation plan. That plan would affect virtually every campus in the 17,000-student district.

The millage and building plan come at a time when the Pulaski County Special district is seeking to win both unitary status from the federal court regarding desegregation efforts and release from state control that resulted from the past audit findings and financial mismanagement. They also come at a time when the state Board of Education is doing a study of school district boundaries among the districts in Pulaski County.

Pulaski County Special School District Superintendent Jerry Guess said Monday that he was motivated to go for the millage increase in May rather than wait for the annual school election in September "by a general sense of enthusiasm throughout the district for new and improved schools."

The 5.6-mill tax increase would raise the district's tax rate to 46.3 mills and would cost the owner of a $100,000 home an additional $112 a year, and the owner of a $200,000 home an additional $224 a year. The district last received voter approval for a property-tax increase in 1992 when voters approved an 8-mill increase at a time when the district was threatened with insolvency.

The proposed building plan -- first described late last year to the federal judge presiding in the district's 32-year-old federal school desegregation lawsuit -- calls for the construction of new Mills and Robinson high school campuses and the expansion of Sylvan Hills High, nearly doubling its size.

Additionally the current Fuller Middle School would be moved to the current Mills High campus in southeast Pulaski County, and Robinson Middle would be moved to the current Robinson High campus in west Pulaski County. The existing middle school buildings at both locations would be demolished for parking.

A new provision in the building plan announced for the first time Monday by district leaders is the construction of an 800-pupil elementary school somewhere along Interstate 440 to replace the Scott , Harris and College Station elementary schools.

Arkansas Education Commissioner Tony Wood serves in lieu of the school board in the district that is in its fourth year of state control as the result of past audit findings and other financial problems. Wood must approve the plans for special tax election within the next 48 hours if the district is to meet the legally required notice requirements for a May 12 election.

The advisory board voted 5-0 with two abstentions for the millage plan at the same meeting in which it also voted to recommend to Wood that Scott Elementary in east Pulaski County and Northwood Middle School in the Gravel Ridge community be closed in the 2015-16 school year.

Guess recommended the closing of the two schools -- over the objections of Scott community members at the meeting -- as a way to save money and address enrollment declines. Scott is serving about 115 children from that community, and Northwood is serving fewer than 350 this year. While Northwood would no longer be used as a regular attendance zone school, it would house students next school year who are now served by Jacksonville Middle School, if Wood approves. The much older and physically unattractive Jacksonville Middle School would actually be the shuttered school in the coming year.

Guess said the plan to build a new elementary school to replace the Scott, Harris and College Station schools came out of the discussions with Scott community residents who argued to save their school as a way to keep elementary children from having to travel as far as 25 miles to Harris Elementary in the McAlmont community.

Derek Scott, the Pulaski County Special district's executive director of operations, told the advisory board that in addition to the new high schools and renovated middle schools, the building plan would seek to provide parity of conditions at all the schools. That would entail replacing portable buildings with permanent classrooms, installing walls in open-space schools, renovating school kitchens, improving traffic access and providing gymnasiums and multipurpose rooms that do not now have those features, Scott said.

Planning and construction for the new Robinson and Mills high schools would take about three years, Scott said. Each is expected to cost about $50 million.

The district has committed to the federal court that it will build a new Mills and replace Fuller Middle School, regardless of whether the millage is approved by voters. That is part of the district's effort to equalize the condition of its mix of old and very new schools, be declared unitary in regard to its facilities and be released from federal court supervision of its desegregation efforts.

In addition to Mills and Robinson, the district plan calls for expanding Sylvan Hills High at a cost of about $50 million. The school had an enrollment of just more than 700 students two years ago, but has 1,000 students this year and is projected to grow to as many as 1,400 in just the next few years.

Scott said the Sylvan Hills High auditorium is not large enough to hold all the students in just one of its four grade levels.

Community Advisory Board members voting for the building plan were Susie Marks, Tjuana Byrd, Margie Snider, Lindsey Gustafson and Julian McMurray. Advisory board members Daniel Gray and Ron McDaniel, both of Jacksonville, abstained from voting. Gray said later that he didn't think it was right to vote on a matter that would not be an issue in the new Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District.

The proposed tax will not be voted on by Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District residents even though that new district remains a part of the Pulaski County Special district while the two districts negotiate the division of assets, debts, property, students and staff. The tax will not be applied to the residents in the new district.

A mill is one-tenth of 1 cent. One mill levied on an assessed value of $1,000 yields $1 in property taxes. Arkansas counties assess property at 20 percent of appraised value, so a $100,000 house has an assessed value of $20,000. That $20,000 multiplied by the proposed 0.0056 boost would generate the $112 tax increase.

Metro on 03/10/2015

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