System keeps school property taxes high

If ever there was a time for Tarrant County residents to raise Cain over school property taxes, this is it.

What they’re facing today should bring home to them just how screwed up the state’s public school funding system really is. Here’s why:

The Tarrant Appraisal District says taxable property values are up 9.6 percent from a year ago.

Property owners can logically (and correctly) assume there’s no way the costs of running local school districts have gone up that much, so they should expect local school boards to lower tax rates, tempering the increase in tax bills later this year.

Everybody knows costs go up some. Inflation means that all kinds of supplies and equipment used by schools cost more, teachers and other personnel rightly expect raises and buildings have to be repaired and maintained.

Most Tarrant County school districts see more students enroll every year, meaning they need more desks and maybe a few more teachers.

Texas still has an aggressive school accountability program aimed at measuring how much students have learned. Those standards rise every year, and schools are expected to have systems in place to meet them.

We want to keep kids in school. Dropouts have a tougher time finding jobs, and we don’t want that for them or for our state workforce.

But does all of that add up to a need for 9.6 percent more money, which property owners will end up paying if tax rates aren’t cut? Absolutely not.

But tax rates won’t be changed, and local tax revenue will go up in many if not most districts because of the screwy school finance system the Legislature put in place in 2006.

School districts still won’t be rolling in dough.

When school districts raise more money in local taxes, they automatically receive less in funding from the state. The state gets a little richer, not school districts.

And if school districts cut tax rates to bring in fewer local tax dollars, they also lose state dollars because they didn’t maintain “tax effort.”

There are plenty of other quirks in the school finance system. The only part where some taxpayers might see a break is in money raised to pay off bond programs.

Debt service money is outside of the screwiest parts of the system, so some districts might be able to cut rates a little.

Some legislators and state leaders may have thought they caught a break earlier this year when the state Supreme Court declined to order changes in the school finance system.

Taxpayers should say otherwise. Lawmakers must fix this system.

This story was originally published August 11, 2016 at 5:47 PM with the headline "System keeps school property taxes high."