RI Central - Opinions

SK Town Council Letter, $1.3 million school budget cut

Friday, 05 June 2009

As members of the South Kingstown Town Council we are opposed the reduction of the FY 2009-2010 school budget by $ 1.3 million. We urge the voters in South Kingstown to VOTE #1 in Tuesday’s referendum. Your support of the Town Council adopted school budget is urgently necessary to ensure that this spending program, that requests no additional property tax than the current year program is affirmed. Eleven of the twelve members of the Town Council and School Committee support this spending program. Over many hours and in many public work sessions we have meticulously examined the budget and we think future cuts would be irresponsible.

We are fully aware that we are in very tough economic times. It has been an extremely difficult year and no one on the Council took the job lightly. On the municipal side belts were tightened, service reductions were made and jobs were eliminated.

On the school side, the school department is requesting $225,000 less than they received last year from the town tax transfer. The School committee also reduced their funding request by almost $1.2 million during the budget development process. To achieve this revision the school department has taken a number of steps including eliminating twenty-five full time positions, reorganizing our middle school program and reducing the scope of the high schools foreign language program.

The question is what are our community’s values? We think the education of our children is and should be high on everyone’s list.

On Tuesday, June 9th we need your support to maintain and preserve our high performing school system. The bottom line is that the quality of our town’s educational system directly impacts our children's future, our property values and ultimately the viability of our community.

In South Kingstown, the municipal and school systems are well run and consistently operate within budgetary limits. The collective goal of the Town Council and School Committee is to maintain high quality services at a reasonable cost, to insure that our town continues to be a great place to live, work and raise a family.

This budget reduction referendum, scheduled for Tuesday, is engineered and fueled by deceptive information. The $1.3 million cut to the school budget will deprive children of the educational opportunities that we believe are vitally important and will create and adversarial public policy environment, something South Kingstown has successfully avoided for many years.

Those supporting the referendum have compared South Kingstown’s school system to the North Kingstown system. These systems do not lend themselves to simple comparison. North Kingstown has the benefit of receiving approximately $2 million in tuition income for approximately 200 high school students from the town of Jamestown, thereby increasing their pupil count and reducing their cost per pupil cost. In contrast, South Kingstown has 130 students attending charter schools at a cost of $1.25 million to the school system. These charter school students are not recognized as South Kingstown students when standard cost per pupil calculations are made.

Reduction proponents have also suggested that the property tax rate in South Kingstown is higher than in surrounding communities and as such mean that South Kingstown taxpayers are paying a higher tax burden than those in other communities. Such a suggestion is disingenuous. A tax rate is nothing more than the result of dividing the needed tax levy by the amount of taxable property in a community. To simply compare property tax rates does not measure tax burden. A more appropriate measure to evaluate tax burden is to divide the total tax levy by the population of the community. The resultant “per capita property tax” provides a more comparable measure of tax effort. The most current information relative to “per capita property tax” can be found on the State of RI, Department of Administration Web Site.

http://www.muni-info.state.ri.us/documents/finances/property value info/Assessed Valuation of Property/FY09 Assessed Valuation of Property 12-31-07 for web.pdf .

The data shows South Kingstown actually has the lowest tax per capita vs. other compared towns.

South Kingstown
$2,282
North Kingstown
$2,377
Narragansett
$2,458
Charlestown
$2,508
Westerly
$2,566
Barrington
$2,949

Please vote #1 on Tuesday June 9th at the Broad Rock School and keep our children exactly where they should be #1 in some of the best schools in the state. Polls are open from 8 am. until 8 pm.

Respectfully Submitted,

South Kingstown Town Council members;
Kathleen A. Fogarty, President
Mary “Polly” Eddy, Vice President
Ella M. Whaley, Councilwoman
Carol Hagan McEntee, Councilwoman

If you’ve found the time to glance at a calendar lately, you might have
noticed that the number of days until Christmas is growing small.

If you’ve finished your shopping, that glance might have left you with a
warm feeling of accomplishment. If you haven’t, that glance might have
engendered a slight feeling of panic.
SRI Newspapers (SRIN) wants to help. For the past several weeks, the local
newspapers that make up SRIN – including the Kent County Daily Times, The
Coventry Courier, The North Kingstown Standard-Times, The East Greenwich
Pendulum, The Chariho Times, the Narragansett Times, and The Weekender, in
Warwick – have been publishing a full-page ad letting you know about local
merchants who want you to think about having a “Hometown Christmas.”

What better time to visit these local businesses?

This week’s election was historic on several fronts. It was an election
with the highest turnout in history, as Americans went to the polls in
record numbers. In terms of percent turnout, it was the highest – about
64 percent – in over a century.
For years, the general comment during elections was that there was a lack
of interest and low voter turnout. Knowing that the country’s population
is well over 200 million, Americans felt their single vote just didn’t
matter, lost in a sea of population.
This year all that was washed away. Even the youth vote, notorious for
their apathy, came to vote.
And all that is good news.

Search Archives