Opinion 3-minute read

1. They are held in early May.

Most citizens are not paying attention because it’s not a "normal" election time. Most people expect elections to be in November. If you're a family of schoolchildren, ages 4--18 years, May is traditionally one of the, if not the busiest month of the school year. Families are very busy and very few citizens even know the special elections take place. 

2.  School Districts recruit voters from inside their organization/s.

Meanwhile, at the same time that busy families are distracted, Districts have their "own" base. Many of these districts have upwards of 1000 employees each. Because we have education professionals  within our organization, we are fully aware there are tactics used such as email campaigns and even ballot parties for 18-year-old students that recruit the vote. Some Districts even stoop to scaring employees that their jobs will not exist if they don't turn out their inner-district vote. 

3. Layering. 

For example, in one year, a district asks you for a 10-year millage to raise your property taxes. The next year they lay another one on top of it that will raise your property taxes for the next 15 years and this year, the OAISD is asking to raise your property taxes for TWENTY years. Obviously this is way too many years. This recent OAISD 'ask" is the length of an entire generation of people. Who is going to keep track of where all that money is going for the next 20 years? Will you even have a student in the district 20 years from now? Layering makes it impossible, over the length of these times, to hold these districts accountable to these amounts of monies.

4. Layering adds up.

If we focus on micro issues, arguments can be made, such as "...Well, it is only going up $25 this year, and "It’s only going up $75 next year" and so on, but the truth is when we zoom out and look at the macro picture, there really isn’t any homeowner in this county that would deny that their property taxes have gone up significantly over the past 5-7 years. One day you look at your bill and you think, "Wow that’s a lot higher than it used to be. Why is that?" Because special elections are in May when no one knows they are going on, the inner districts recruit their vote, and the general public who is footing the bill doesn’t even know it’s taking place. The district will tell you they do their due diligence by putting marketing graphics on their social media but at the end of the day, the legacy media doesn’t cover it and the taxpayers are the last to know.

5. Seniors on a Fixed Income are Being Taxed out of their homes.

Finally, the biggest moral problem with the school districts doing this is that they are administratively overstaffed, they don’t typically make the case that they will hire more teachers, they advance for the most part, curriculums that involve wokeism, and worst of all senior citizens who own their homes outright can no longer afford to stay in them on the fixed income of their retirement. It is important to ask yourself whether you will help drive seniors out of their homes this May 6th or stand up and send a message. These Districts are asking too often for too much when they have other sources of funding. It is a fact that of the $20 billion state budget for education, 17.4 billion of it comes from the lottery, gambling, tax on marijuana, cigarettes, alcohol, and the like. Only 2.5 billion comes from your property taxes. It seems they are double dipping and at the same time, it doesn’t seem like the truancy rates are any better, that literacy rates are any better, or that the SAT scores are any better either. 

You Decide on May 6th.