South Range schools meeting on finances at 7 tonight

NORTH LIMA

South Range school district is having a meeting at 7 p.m. tonight in the school auditorium.

Now that South Range school officials have placed an operating levy on the May 5 ballot, the district’s levy committee will start to communicate the need for funding.

The budget numbers have yet to be updated since the November levy failed, but they show a slim surplus for fiscal year 2016, or school year 2015-16, but a deficit beginning in fiscal year 2017 that multiplies from there.

Larry Maynard, levy chairman for Citizens for South Range Schools, said with the way the state is cutting funding to schools there is a “transferring [of] the responsibliity more to the families and leaving it up to them as far as what they want in schools and police and fire protection. And I think that’s a big thing that we need to stress. That is a big responsibility we need to take on.”

Voters will have in front of them a three-year, 4.9-mill emergency operating levy that will generate $931,838 over that time period. District Treasurer Jim Phillips said it will cost the owner of a $100,000 home $171.50 a year. That compares with the most recent levy that voters rejected in November that was a 10-year, 3.9-mill operating levy that would have generated $707,500 annually. Another failed levy in 2013 was for 4.8-mills.

The three-year operating levy will provide funding for the second half of the 2015-16 school year and then for the full school years of 2016-17 and 2017-18. The last amount of funding from this levy, if approved, would be for the first half of the 2018-19 school year.