Not As Easy As It Looks
Throughout this discussion people have posted things to the effect of if the school doesn't have the money they should cut back, and the city and township have to take the blame for the school's financial troubles. Neither of these ideas are quite correct. Let me explain.
The first idea of cutting back if you don't have the money sounds good on the surface. There are consequences to that, though. If your personal income is reduced then of course you cut your spending, but another way of looking at that is that your standard of living goes down. You also get to the point where you have bills that need to be paid and you can't cut back further. Some examples of this include mortgage payments, car payments, utility bills, taxes, and I'm sure you can think of many more. At some point, if your income is reduced enough, you end up borrowing more and more, and using unsecured debt like home equity loans and credit cards, to make it through the month.
The same is true for the school district. To maintain the level of education that Pickerington area residents expect, the district needs to spend approximately $7500/student/year. If the district mentions cutting vital programs to stay afloat, the residents go nuts. Look what happened when the School Board voted to cut extracurricular activites last year. Well, now the one-time payment from Portrait Homes has been spent, and parents either need to fork over more money for extracurriculars or face cuts, either to extracurriculars or academics.
The second idea is to blame the city and township for flooding the school district with new students (over 500 last year). On the surface it looks like the city and township can be blamed, but if you look deeper, this argument also doesn't hold water. In the state of Ohio, townships and municipalities cannot impose moratoria to help the schools. It sounds crazy, but it's true. They can impose moratoria briefly to help infrastructure such as roads, sewers, water and others, catch up with growth. They can plan growth in a number of ways, but none of this can be explicity for the schools.
There's also no law that says these entities need to work together, so if one part of the school district decides to build single family homes with reckless abandon, there's nothing the other entities or the schools can do. Look what happened when Columbus decided to annex into the district and build at 6 lots/acre. The PLSD could do nothing.
What's the answer? For me the answer is that I'm proud to live in the school district, I hope we will be able to once again attain an ''excellent'' rating, and if I want to continue to live here then I need to pony up. I will be supporting the next school levy, mostly because I have faith in Vince Utterback and his financial abilities. If he says we don't have then money, then we don't have the money.
By Taxpayer
Throughout this discussion people have posted things to the effect of if the school doesn't have the money they should cut back, and the city and township have to take the blame for the school's financial troubles. Neither of these ideas are quite correct. Let me explain.
The first idea of cutting back if you don't have the money sounds good on the surface. There are consequences to that, though. If your personal income is reduced then of course you cut your spending, but another way of looking at that is that your standard of living goes down. You also get to the point where you have bills that need to be paid and you can't cut back further. Some examples of this include mortgage payments, car payments, utility bills, taxes, and I'm sure you can think of many more. At some point, if your income is reduced enough, you end up borrowing more and more, and using unsecured debt like home equity loans and credit cards, to make it through the month.
The same is true for the school district. To maintain the level of education that Pickerington area residents expect, the district needs to spend approximately $7500/student/year. If the district mentions cutting vital programs to stay afloat, the residents go nuts. Look what happened when the School Board voted to cut extracurricular activites last year. Well, now the one-time payment from Portrait Homes has been spent, and parents either need to fork over more money for extracurriculars or face cuts, either to extracurriculars or academics.
The second idea is to blame the city and township for flooding the school district with new students (over 500 last year). On the surface it looks like the city and township can be blamed, but if you look deeper, this argument also doesn't hold water. In the state of Ohio, townships and municipalities cannot impose moratoria to help the schools. It sounds crazy, but it's true. They can impose moratoria briefly to help infrastructure such as roads, sewers, water and others, catch up with growth. They can plan growth in a number of ways, but none of this can be explicity for the schools.
There's also no law that says these entities need to work together, so if one part of the school district decides to build single family homes with reckless abandon, there's nothing the other entities or the schools can do. Look what happened when Columbus decided to annex into the district and build at 6 lots/acre. The PLSD could do nothing.
What's the answer? For me the answer is that I'm proud to live in the school district, I hope we will be able to once again attain an ''excellent'' rating, and if I want to continue to live here then I need to pony up. I will be supporting the next school levy, mostly because I have faith in Vince Utterback and his financial abilities. If he says we don't have then money, then we don't have the money.
By Taxpayer
