More Good News

Here’s a surprise we never saw coming. From KVIA:

The El Paso school district is proposing a tax increase and will vote on it during its meeting Tuesday.

The average home would pay an extra $8.62 per year.

Even though the proposed tax rate is still the same as last year’s, property values around the district have gone up which means the district will be taking in more money than it did last year.

The average home is expected to pay $1,407 compared to last year’s tax bill of $1,398.

Say what? Are they raising the rate, or will El Pasoans just be paying more because they’re property values are up? And the school board has to vote on that?

I’m betting they vote to collect more taxes.

But don’t worry. They’ve got plans for your money.

The number of students enrolling in the El Paso Independent School District is falling by more than one-thousand every year, leading to a loss of about $6 million in funding every year, district officials said.

“That’s about the size of a small high school,” said EPISD Board of Trustees President Dori Fenenbock. “And we’re not just going to sit back and accept that. We’re going to change the trend.”

. . .

“The programs we offer in EPISD, whether it’s laptops in classrooms early universal – early Pre-K, the early college high schools, dual-language across the district,” Fenenbock said. “These are programs that resonate in our community, and are important to our families and our parents. And when they’re looking at choices where they want to send their students, they will choose EPISD because of it.”

On Tuesday’s agenda is consideration of a $250,000 contract to hire the marketing and promotions firm BrandEra. The company has worked on similar types of campaigns involving school district choice elsewhere in Texas, particularly the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Do you get the feeling that it’s all about them? What about providing value to the taxpayer?

Laptops?

Hold onto your wallet.