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TIM CURRAN
THE MID-COUNTY MEMO
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| In February, the Parkrose Board of Education, from left Chair Ed Grassel, Vice Chair Thuy Tran, James Trujillo, Mary Lu Baetkey and Erick Flores voted unanimously to explore placing a five-year local-option levy on May's ballot. Mid-county Memo photo/Tim Curran |
The school board not only authorized Superintendent Karen Fischer Gray to spend $5,000 on a tax compression rate study to determine how much could be raised, but also another $10,000 for a telephone survey of Parkrose voters.
The district hopes to add between $850,000 and $1.2 million a year to its general fund with the property tax. Gray said the revenue would be used to hire teachers to address the district's oversized classes.
A $200,000 home would pay an additional $170 in taxes at a rate of 85 cents per thousand of assessed value, according to figures supplied by the district.
“I thought we could raise more,” Gray told board members. “If you look at your tax statement, you know your [homes'] values are down. For me, as your superintendent, I'm not willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater on this. I would say to you hiring back 10 more teachers is more important than almost anything else.”
The board votes on referring the levy at its March 10 meeting after hearing results of the survey
“Two hundred dollars is a lot of money on top of everything else that is on that bill,” Vice Chair Thuy Tran said, during the board's discussion, despite voting to expend the money. “That's going to bring my property tax close to $5,000 a year.”
When fellow board member Mary Lu Baetkey asked her what value she placed on her children's education, Tran, who has three children attending Parkrose schools, answered, “Yes, but I want it be successful on this project that we're going to go on to and not be successful on a bond and levy by six votes.”
Tran was referring to the May 2011 election when Parkrose voters passed a 30-year, $63-million-dollar general obligation construction and technology bond by six votes out of more than 5,000 cast. That bond funded a new middle school, a remodel of the district's four elementary schools and a technology upgrade.
Tran added, “I would like us to think carefully, before we ask our community, and our community-not all of them have kids in our schools-how successful we will be, because we will have to spend money to make this happen and so you [Fischer Gray] and Mary (Mary Larson Director of Business Services) do research to make sure that we're gonna be successful if we embark this.”
Board member Erick Flores, a teacher in the David Douglas School District, is concerned with not only staff cuts, larger class sizes and declining test scores, but also how that translates to neighborhoods around the schools.
“We need to bring back staff,” he said. “I'm a teacher; I can teach 25 kids. I have time to. If I have 42, I don't have enough. As a taxpayer, I'd be more than happy to pay that money so that we can have another teacher in the classroom.” He added, “If we don't make investments in our infrastructure at this point, 10 years from now, we're going to look worse. We want to grow so that our homes continue being a valuable place to live. Otherwise, we run into the risk of becoming more like the Marshall community. I'd like to see us more like Grant or Lincoln High School, where people come out; they support the schools, then young families want to move there.”
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