Decatur Hosts “Community Budget Gathering” Tomorrow Night
Decatur Metro | May 19, 2014 | 3:56 pmInterested in digging deep into Decatur’s budgeting process? Clear your calendar for tomorrow night…
Community Budget Gathering Tomorrow
DATE: Tuesday, May 20
TIME: 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
LOCATION: Decatur City Hall, 509 N. McDonough St.The City of Decatur is hosting another Community Budget Gathering on Tuesday, May 20 from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at Decatur City Hall, 509 N. McDonough St. Join Budget Manager Meredith Roark, Assistant City Manager Andrea Arnold and others interested in learning about the City’s budget process.
This is your chance to find out how the budget process works and give your input. If you missed the first Community Budget Gathering back in April, don’t worry. Participation then is not required to attend tomorrow evening’s meeting. Sign up today with Meredith, [email protected] or call 404-370-4102, if you think you’ll be attending.
Graphic courtesy of the City of Decatur
Just to confirm that I understand the graphic: 61% of our tax dollars go toward the charter schools? Am I misreading something because that seems even higher than I realized?
Judging from my city tax bill, it’s more like 66%. The above does not include the bill the county sends you, so if you include them then the school’s share of overall property taxes goes down somewhat.
Re “61% of our tax dollars go toward the charter schools?”: not sure what is meant but City Schools of Decatur has no charter schools at all. We have a system charter which is a totally different animal. It means that the school system as a whole has some flexibility with a limited number of state requirements. It also means that there’s some limited local school governance, hence school leadership teams. Actually, CSD is almost the opposite of charter schools; it has quite strong central leadership and system-wide uniformity.
Whether it’s one school or a group of schools, they still operate under a charter, or performance-based agreement, via an independent board that has some flexibility in curriculum, while retaining some accountability to the state, and are largely funded by the public, hence our high taxes. That’s my read according to gacharters dot org and gadoe dot org, hence charter schools.
Back to my actual question, I’m aware we pay county taxes, too, which accounted for 22% of my total last year. I simply want to get an idea of the percentage by category, as I thought schools were closer to 55%.
I understand parents with kids in the system are fully vested in providing for them, which is great, but also try looking at it from the standpoint of a childless household, which is still the majority. More and more lately, there just doesn’t seem like as much incentive to hang around Decatur vs selling my fixer upper, hence I’m trying to gather info to make an informed decision. I might be among a relative few in that opinion, but I have to look out for my spouse’s and my financial future, too.
Sorry if I’m quibbling but misunderstanding of CSD’s charter has been common and caused some disappointment among folks who thought we had charter schools. We are not a system of charter schools in any way, shape, or form. We are a system charter, a term that is close to a misnomer because it evokes the idea of charter schools. Charter schools operate close to independently of a central school system; CSD schools do not. While they have school leadership teams, those teams have limited, defined authority with everything else still controlled by Central Office. What a system charter does is allow the school system itself to have some autonomy from the State, probably not as much as folks originally hoped. The system charter also came with some original funding for development but that’s long gone. As far as I know, the system charter has zero impact on the proportion of our city taxes that go to CSD.
Since you are asking for clarification, the graphic clearly says that 61% of taxes go to CITY schools, not charter schools.
You also send property tax to DeKalb County. Of the total property tax bill City & County (according to online spreadsheets), 51% of property taxes goes to CSD for Decatur residents. For DeKalb County residents, 59% goes to DeKalb schools.
So a higher percentage goes to schools in DeKalb as compared to Decatur. That’s not because the Decatur school bill is lower, it’s slightly higher in fact, but mostly because the NON-SCHOOL taxes (city and county combined) for Decatur residents are A LOT higher. 62% higher.
Feel free to share this with people who say Decatur residents pay such high taxes because of CSD.
Not great at math, so maybe I’m just not following, but why would you include county taxes to arrive at a percentage of taxes Decatur residents pay for schools? Of course, you do hit on one of the issues with Decatur: you have to pay city and county taxes. And regardless of the percentages, Decatur’s taxes are based on 50 percent of assessed values rather than 40 percent.