Board counting the ways to spend sales tax
KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER
In November, Florida Keys voters will be asked to decide whether to extend for 10 years a half-cent sales tax that funds construction and other capital expenditures for the Monroe County School District.
The tax was authorized by the state Legislature in 2002, approved for the first time locally in 2004 and took effect in 2006.
If authorized in November, the half-cent sales tax would go into effect again Jan. 1, 2016, and be levied for a decade with projections estimating around $14 million in annual revenue.
School Board members plan on detailing specific projects that need funding in an effort to sell voters; that campaign push will likely start sometime in late August, according to board members.
“We need to lay out a list,” board member John Dick said. “We’ve talked in generalities about it up until this point.”
Later in the year, “We’ll be going around to different civic and community organizations to ask for support and answer any questions.”
Board Chairman Emeritus Andy Griffiths said one key area the district needs to spend money on is technology upgrades ranging from classroom computers for students to web-enabled smartboards used for instruction.
“We can’t not have,” current technology, he told Konk Life. “You’ve got to be competitive in technology.”
“We were on the cutting edge, then we were on the leading edge,” Griffiths said. “Now I don’t know what edge we’re on.”
Last Wednesday the Monroe County Commission, meeting for a regularly scheduled session, authorized the Monroe County Supervisor of Elections to place the referendum question on the Nov. 4 countywide ballot.
The referendum questions reads: “The School District’s capital improvement plan is ongoing. Additional funding is required to upgrade and address security needs at school facilities, equip schools with modern technology, construct new facilities, provide for renovations and additions to existing school structures and other permitted capital improvements. Shall the School Board of Monroe County, Florida continue to levy a one-half cent sales tax for a period of ten (10) years beginning January 1, 2016?”
Dick and Griffiths agreed that the district needs to take a look at security infrastructure—intercom and alert systems, teacher panic buttons and the like—when deciding how to divvy up the capital money, assuming the referendum passes.
In February 2013 at Horace O’Bryant Middle School in Key West, a student brought an air-powered pellet gun to the campus. When administrators went to call for a school lockdown, the intercom system failed.
In January, a Key Largo School student threatened to kill his teacher and third grade classmates. The teacher hit his in-room panic button to alert the front office of the situation but the button didn’t work.
Dick and Griffiths also singled out Gerald Adams Elementary School on Stock Island and Plantation Key School in the Upper Keys as at the top of the list for major improvements.
Griffths called the sister schools, which share very similar layout, design and construction, “obvious needs,” while Dick said they were “at the top of the list” for capital expenditure.
Other components of the district’s capital plan are contained in the so-called work plan submitted each year by school districts to regulators with the Florida Department of Education.
Consummate district critic Larry Murray, a former member of the Audit and Finance Committee and unsuccessful candidate for the District 3 School Board seat held by member Ed Davidson, opined in a July 16 email to the School Board “that success or failure of the referendum will depend on the case that the district makes to the voters.”
“The public needs to know what, when, where and how its money will be spent.
With that, Murray encouraged board members to follow advice previously laid out in an annual report by the Florida Auditor General’s Office and create a “long-range facilities planning committee.”
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Sean,
Glad to see you back and covering School District hijinks!
They haven’t changed since you left.
“Consummate district critic” — I love it.
It looks like my resurrection of the promise made to the Auditor General to consider creation of long-range facilities planning committee may have gotten short shrift in your article. It’s a subject to which I hope you will return. I certainly plan to do so and am highly unlikely to support the renewal of the half-cent sales tax without the creation of such a citizen committee.