Superintendent Press Release August 19, 2022
Dear Cedar Bluffs Families,
Next week High School athletics start with Golf, Volleyball and Football all having competitions. Homecoming is early this year, September 10th, so please plan accordingly. Also, the board of education voted to amend this year’s calendar moving graduation from May 13th to May 6th due to an unforeseen and unpreventable circumstance. I truly hope this doesn’t cause a great deal of scheduling issues for anyone with a senior, but I know the kids were excited to be getting out of school 5 days earlier.
The CDC revised its recommendation and no longer is requiring anyone to “quarantine”. Reminder that if you are positive, you must “isolate” for 5 days then wear a mask for another 5 days. “Quarantine” happens if you have been exposed to a positive case, like someone in your home is positive. The CDC has said, quarantine is not required but they are asking anyone exposed to wear a mask for 10 days and monitor symptoms. Cedar Bluffs Public School, along with all the schools in the Three River Health jurisdiction have been encouraged to follow this recommendation.
This time of year, I spend a great deal of time working on the budget and although the Cedar Bluffs Public School will be proposing to lower the tax levy for the 14th straight year, with the increase in property valuations it will still lead to the school requesting more tax dollars than we did last year. Approximately $70,000 more in property taxes even though the school will be reducing the tax levy by a little over 2 cents. Looking at this as an individual taxpayer: with the levy decrease, if your valuation stayed the same or lowered then you will be paying less property taxes but those like me that saw an 18% increase in the valuation of their property, they will be paying more. I showed the school board in our August board meeting that even if the school didn’t ask for a penny more in taxes than we asked for last year, I as a taxpayer would still have a $267 increase in my property taxes from the valuation increase alone. The increase in tax asking by the school is roughly 1.5%, even though I anticipate at least a 7% increase in all goods and services due to inflation. I also know that just salary and benefit costs for the school will increase by $143,250 this year and we had a reduction in our State Aid of $124,798. State Aid is determined by Needs, which are basically calculated by the number of students you have, minus Resources, which is your valuation multiplied by $1.00. So, when valuation goes up, Resources go up and therefore that State determines the school need less State Aid and will reduce the amount of Aid received. Furthermore, to complicate things this year, the legislation passed LB644 which is referred to as the “postcard” bill. All schools in the State are allowed to increase tax asking by 2% plus “real growth”. For Cedar Bluffs that real growth was about .83%, so in total we could increase taxes by 2.83% but are electing to only increase our tax request by about 1.5% to try to make up for the loss in State Aid and increase in costs. If a school exceeds the 2% plus real growth, then they are required to send a post card to ever taxpayer in the district and hold a special meeting to explain why they are exceeding this percentage. It will be interesting to see how many schools in Nebraska will have to hold this special meeting but fortunately Cedar Bluffs Public School will not.
#Wildcat Pride!