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Brandywine now
seen likely
to avoid a tax referendum The
Brandywine
school board adopted a final $143.1 million budget for the
current fiscal year which seems to indicate that the district
will be able to put off a tax referendum for at least another
year.
After the board's
monthly business meeting financial officer David Blowman told
Delaforum that a decision in that regard will not be made until
after the turn of the calendar year. But he confirmed that it
"now appears unlikely" that a higher tax rate will be needed
until fiscal 2013. If so, the district will have gone five years
without a property tax hike, two more than promised after the
2007 referendum. "We're beginning to see the [financial] benefit
of the difficult decision to close two school buildings," he
said. The current expense tax rate -- the only component
of the total rate subject to referendum -- stands at $1.289 for
each $100 of assessed property value, the upper limit. The total
rate, including debt service incurred as the result of
voter-approved capital projects, is $1.8215.
At the meeting on
Dec. 13 Blowman reported that Brandywine had a net gain of 333
students 'choicing in' from other districts, up from 250 last
year. On the other hand, it lost 653 students to charter
schools, up from 621. The $2.6 million in tuition that it has
had to pay charter schools more than offset the $978,000 netted
through the choice law. Blowman explained that the numbers of
children involved and variations in the formulas to calculate
payments produced that wide gap. Superintendent Mark Holodick
told the board that nine paraprofessionals will be called back
or hired through the rest of this year using federal education
jobs support dollars. Most of the money the district received
will be banked to replace federal stimulus dollars that won't be
forthcoming next year, he said. |