If you’ve not been following the situation in the Kensingston/East Kingston School District, you can get caught up here, but it involves schools, so the problem is one with which you are likely familiar. It is something and a microcosm of the problem with public education.
Spending and cost per student are climbing to or past elite college tuition rates for less than even pedestrian results. Taxpayers have been trying to educate the peeps, including a warrant article to validate a zero-cost citizen study to consolidate some school buildings to reduce the tax burden.
The Town won’t help, the school district won’t help, the courts won’t help, and even when they follow the rules and get the signatures, the warrant isn’t allowed on the ballot.
Did I mention the courts won’t help?
This cabal of resistance to change has not gone unnoticed.
This year, voters rejected the town budget, school budget, and teachers’ contract. All well and good, but it does not solve the institutional economic rape that continues to occur as a result of school spending acorss the state
Let me be clear. There is no property tax problem; it is entirely a school district spending problem. If the school line item on your tax bill was anywhere near the town and county municipal cost per thousand, property taxes would be a topic but not a panic attack or a statewide political battle.
I’ll use my tax bill as an example.
Cost per thousand:
- Town: 4.38
- County: 1.33
- School: 14.96
- State Ed: 1.44
Some of you reading this, especially in Kenninston and Kingston, would kill for school rates that low, but it is easily 10/thousand too high.
The town does its thing for 25K people at a rate of 4.38/thousand, and I bet you there is room for improvement if we invited DOGE in to take a look, but overall, this rate isn’t a hardship. Spending 97 million (proposed) to not educate 3500 kids (27K/student) is criminal behavior and entirely the problem with local property taxes.
Our school budget should be 25 million tops, which would drop the school rate to about 4.48/thousand, which would cut my property tax bill by more than half.
The other problem, and the reason it’s a problem, is because Democrats, Teachers Unions, and the Ed industrial complex is very likely in on the scam. Not the rape taxpayers to not educate kids scam, “the rape taxpayers to get them to think a state-wide tax of any kind is the solution” scam.
The Democrat mind is a simple one, and maybe that’s why so many pubic school (that’s not a misspelling) graduates are so easily convinced by its nonsense. Whenever Democrats want something, they do everything in their power to make it outrageously expensive and inefficient. Energy, Education, transportation, food, and housing. Everything that invites an even more expensive government response, which makes the problem worse, it has to justify the massive bureaucracy erected, not to solve problems but to protect politicians who bemoan the crisis they created but always blame on someone else.
In East-Kingston and Kensington, they created the problem and don’t want anyone to slow spending or God forbid roll it back. The courts are no longer of any use despite Al Brandano continuing to try and use them, and the rock upon which Dan Richards waves have long crashed. He has found them not just unwilling to bend to the in-state cabal, but must inevitably look outside the State for justice.
My guess is Al will as well, but he still has a good way to go before he runs out of in-state options, which is another tactic the government uses against you. You sue them, they use tax dollars for lawyers, and you pay out of pocket, and they wait until you can no longer afford to make your case.
The absurd part of this is that the warrant is no-cost. It adds no dollars to the budget, but the district is fighting it, and the courts are taking their side.
Al has produced a motion for an amended complaint, see here and here, in an effort to once more get the warrant on the next ballot, one that meets all the requirements and was not (I am told) delivered late last time.
The District doesn’t want to hear anything about costs, spending, or value, so they will continue to oppose anything because the system is flawed in their favor. No matter what you do, the budget will grow, outcomes will decline, and they will say the problem is spending, but none of this is about education. It is about driving the people who are getting fiscally raped to allow an income or sales tax or both, which will only result in a higher total tax burden and a trip down the same slope that claimed every other state that tried the same thing.
We will still be overspending on schools, getting crappy results, but everything else will start to cost more, businesses will be less incentivized to move here or stay here, and the doom loop that has claimed California, New York, and Vermont will claim us as well.
The solution is not to end property taxes because you need local control of local spending, and there is no other general manner in which to collect the revenue. Do not give that up. We do need to cap it./ We need laws making it illegal to charge taxes at a value that the market has not affirmed. It is illegal to tax investments at some random future best sale price; therefore, it cannot be legal to tax a home you bought for 120K at 450K. And none of that would make your tax bill go down; they will always want their money.
The issue is overpriced schools producing underachieving graduates.
Yes, I am all in on Al and his efforts. A school consolidation could slow the bleeding, and you have to do whatever you can, but the “education paid for up front by every taxpayer’s model” is a Ponzi scheme or at least a bait and switch or false advertising. Something scheming and fraudulent and corrupt. It is a failed system unless the goal is to graduate increasingly less bright students while we drive people out of their houses on the way to a broad-based tax that won’t make anything, especially education, better or less expensive.
School choice helps, but until every school has to compete for students based on price and performance and the tuition they collect defines their budget, not the taxpayer hostage situation we currently use, nothing will get better.
I’m not sure what that looks like, and it is not unfair to suggest some very small pool of resources to help low and middle-income families cover tuition costs, but the smaller that is, the lower the costs will be and the better our outcomes.
If people had to choose with their own money, they would almost never choose any of our current public schools, which means government monopoly-run K-12 education needs to die, or we need a way to force them to compete, and it can’t happen soon enough.
