School districts and finances
Area schools have received their report cards, and the results showed how are students are doing in math, reading, science and writing.
All of that education requires money, and no two school districts are created equal.
How do the finances in your school district add up?
Revenue by source
Despite the federal government’s authority to regulate all kinds of things regarding education in the classroom, there’s one thing the feds don’t do.
Pay for it. Or at least, not very much of it.
According to the report cards from last spring, only $7.30 of every $100 that it takes to run the state’s classrooms came from the federal government. In almost every Bureau County school district, that figure was even less.
In the Dalzell and Hall High School districts, only $1.20 out of every $100 came from the federal government, and the Princeton High School District got only $1.60.
Even the two local districts that exceeded the state average — DePue with $11.80 and Leepertown with $9.30 of every $100 — still needed to find about 90 percent of their income elsewhere.
For all but three of the county’s districts, that elsewhere translated mostly into tax dollars from area homeowners and businesses. In the Princeton High School District, that meant $65.30 out of every $100 used to operate the school came from area taxpayers, more than $7 higher than the state average. The Hall district was the only other district to exceed the state average, at $60 per $100.
On the other end of the spectrum, DePue property owners chipped in only $16 for every $100 used to run the district.
The other major source of school funding comes from general state aid. The DePue district led the county in this category, as the state chipped in $56.70 for every $100 used to operate the school, more than three times the state average of $18.10. Dalzell came in second, with $45.70 coming from the state for each $100 used to operate the school.
The Princeton High School District was the only county district to fall below the state average at $17.30, and the Malden School District tied the average at $18.10.
Valuation and tax rate
All of the above figures are impacted by a school district’s equalized assessed valuation, so it should come as no surprise that in 2005 the Princeton High School District had the highest EAV per pupil, with $371,367 in property value standing behind each student in the district. That number was followed by $235,659 in the Ohio High School District and $177,045 in the Princeton Elementary District, all the way through the $20,986 in the DePue District.
Comparing tax rates across the district is more complicated, as it is more likely to compare apples to oranges.
The Bureau Valley’s 2005 tax rate was the highest in the county at $5.95, but since Bureau Valley is a unit school district, that rate covered both expenses for the high school and the elementary school. The same situation applied to the LaMoille School District with its tax rate of $5.89, and DePue with its tax rate of $5.86.
Taxpayers in each of the other school districts would need to add their elementary school and high school rates to find out just how much they chipped in to educate their own students.
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Editor’s note: This is the final installment in a multi-part series on the 2008 Illinois Report Card.
