Carroll officials study bond for repairs, upgrades

Carroll school district officials are looking at a possible May 2017 bond election as the best way to tackle long-term maintenance, technology upgrades and equipment replacement, along with a few new construction items.

For property wealthy school districts like Carroll, skyrocketing tax values have little impact on the daily operating budget because the amount the district receives to educate each student is determined by the state, Superintendent David Faltys told parents at a Nov. 28 town hall meeting at Carroll Senior High School.

Back in 2005, the Texas Legislature set the amount of funding needed to educate each student. If a school district pulls in more revenue than that amount, it goes back to the state in recapture under Chapter 41, or Robin Hood, he said. The amount schools get per pupil has been largely stagnant for the last decade.

“We actually got $35 less per student last year than in 2005-06,” Faltys said.

For the current budget year, Carroll schools are sending $19 million in operating budget tax revenues back to the state. For every $1 collected on the maintenance and operations side, officials send back around 19 cents. With taxes collected for bond issues, the district keeps all the revenue.

The Grapevine-Colleyville school district also sends money back to the state, with about $30 million going back this year. Voters approved a $249 million bond package there in May to handle long-term maintenance and upgrades.

"Bond elections are vitally important for districts subject to Robin Hood, " Superintendent Robin Ryan said in an interview earlier this year. "We gain about 25 cents on the dollar when we work to fund as much as legally possible with bond funds."

Repairing aging facilities

With more than 80 percent of the operating budget in Carroll schools going to personnel costs and the rest earmarked for utility bills, supplies and fuel, district officials said they couldn’t address many of the big-ticket maintenance items without bond dollars.

Well over half the $208 million in facility needs posed by the Capital Needs Planning Committee would address recurring items like roofs, flooring, mechanical, electrical and plumbing replacements, paving repairs, technology upgrades and new buses and band instruments.

John Haugen, a bond consultant for Carroll schools, said many of the district’s facilities were built 15 to 25 years ago and need attention.

For instance, the Carroll Aquatics Center is now 15 years old and needs about $4.5 million in renovations, including a $1 million heating, ventilation and air conditioning system, a refurbished pump room and major repairs to the pool itself, he said.

A new $24 million fine arts center on the northwest corner of the Carroll Senior High School campus would house band and choir, freeing up space for engineering and journalism programs, which would then allow for other classrooms to be enlarged, Haugen said.

Carroll officals are conducting meetings with school and community groups and gathering input on a possible bond via an online survey. They plan to share the feedback with board members in January. Trustees would need to call a bond election by mid-February to make the May ballot.

For more information, visit carrollbudget.com.

This story was originally published December 6, 2016 at 4:52 PM with the headline "Carroll officials study bond for repairs, upgrades."