June 23, 2018 – School Board Meeting
Board members Glaros and Treon were absent.
What’s in Your Wallet?
Have you compared your tax bill to the one from 2017? My school taxes increased 2.47%. ACT I is supposed to limit increases to 2.4% per year. The School Board claimed the increase would only be 2.3%. I’m sure the $1.1 million dollar baseball field at the Intermediate School and the $111,000 for a bulldozer didn’t help.
Comment below to let me know how much your bill increased.
References:
Duffy, Kevin. (June 18, 2018). Nazareth School Board Passes budget with 2.3 percent tax hike. The Morning Call. http://www.mcall.com/news/local/mc-nws-nazareth-school-district-budget-tax-hike-20180618-story.html
Best, John. (July 4, 2018). Nazareth official cries foul about school district’s new $1M baseball field. The Express Times. https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/nazareth/index.ssf/2018/07/nazareth_official_cries_foul_a.html
Brief Squabble Over Spending
Linda Stubits voted against item 6H: $6,280 for 20 iPads to be used for gifted students at the Intermediate School. The budget included coverage for 740 iPads and Stubits questioned why the school needed more. When she asked how many gifted students would be in the class, the assistant superintendent couldn’t provide the number, but said she’d look it up later.
Item 6 also included $98,937 to upgrade the wireless at Butz Elementary and $9,960 for security systems at the middle and high school. Item 7 included the purchase of another 100 iPads for $31,400 and $7,300 for 100 iPad cases and a charging cabinet.
Agenda Items
Items 5, 6, 7, 9 & 11 passed. A link to the agenda and minutes can be found here: https://www.boarddocs.com/pa/naza/Board.nsf/Public
Becky Bartlett covers these meetings because citizens have a right to know what their government is doing.
Upper Nazareth Township Meetings 
My kids came home from intermediate school really excited about all these new iPads that the school had upgraded to until I explained that we were paying much more money in taxes this year for those iPads. Meanwhile they have 30+ students in each classroom. Just an observation, but with all the evidence-based research about learning, wouldn’t my increased taxes be better spent on smaller class sizes? Also, with all the new housing development, shouldn’t our tax load be going down, not up? That’s the purpose of mils as opposed to bonds (for building) and Levys (for learning) so far as I know.
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I wouldn’t mind paying for the computers if the district could show data that they improve education. And I agree with you about the class sizes.
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