Letter to the Editor: The Truth About the "Promise

Recently the School District received the report about the progress in the Sales Tax ”Promise“ made to the taxpayers in 2002. The taxpayers voted to give the School district a ? cent sales tax to be spend according to the ”Promise,“ a three page document which details where the District will spend this money.

At the very top, the district promised to ”STOP USING PORTABLES AS PERMANENT CLASSROOMS“. This part of the promise has not been kept, but the committee chose to bury this fact in verbiage in the middle of the report. According to a report supplied by the district, in spite of receiving to date $181,000,000, they only reduced the classroom portables by a total of two. Today, we have over 3,000 students still utilizing portable classrooms and we have over 7,000 empty student stations.  

Another part of the promise was that it would be a ”PAY AS YOU GO“ system. The average taxpayer would assume that the district would use the $20,000,000 received each year to build.  But the district borrowed the monies against the future receipts. So, the interest to be paid on these borrowings is approximately $20,000,000 or one year’s sales tax receipts. The other outcome of this action is that of the $146,000,000 to be received from 2012 to 2018, $111,000,000 is obligated to pay off the debt. This means that there is only about $5,000,000 per year to be spent on new schools in the future. This would indicate that no more portable classrooms will be eliminated.

The School District has chosen to spend $23,000,000 of the sales tax monies on technology even though this was not listed in the ”The Promise“. The district maintains that it was in the ballot ”language“ and is statutorily available to them.

The only information the committee had to consider was presented to them by the District.  Further investigation revealed that there is a report on portables used as classrooms.  It was put out by FISH (Florida Inventory of School Houses), which shows that the use of portables used as classrooms has increased since 2002.

When the report was presented at the School board Meeting, the Board Members had no questions to ask and were reduced to saying, thanks for your efforts. It appears that the Board has not received copies of the report to review. The Superintendent waived a piece of paper over his head and said that he had highlighted the schools that had been built with sales tax monies and that those schools showed a decrease in portables. No way of knowing what parameters were used in this waived in the air report.

Please note that even though there are listed 17 members on the Sales Tax Committee, only 6 attended more than half of the meetings. The committee members who expressed ideas that were contrary to the position that the district wanted to put forward were harassed both at the Sales Tax Committee meetings and at the School Board Meeting. The sales tax monies are very important to the district, over $20 million a year and they will do what it takes to make sure that his tax is renewed in 2018.

Peggy Martin
Educational Committee
Manatee County