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Friends:
Attached is an idea for an approach for educating our
community about school funding -- one of our greatest individual expenses
and one which few really understand.
If you want to convince our community that you are good
stewards of our money, and want their support on additional levies, you need
to change the game. In the past, levy campaigns have been about "do you love
you children?" kinds of questions. You can be sure that there are plenty of
people in the community who will answer that question: "yes, I love my
children and I still think you're wasting my money."
I recommend that that you appeal to the left-brain side of
this situation this time around. A key misunderstanding that exists in our
community is that the taxes generated by an incremental house pays for the
incremental cost of educating the children from that house. This
presentation attempts to make the point that school funding is a three-way
partnership of the homeowners in the district, the businesses in the
district, and the State of Ohio -- and the burden is being shifted steadily
to the homeowners. The longer you have lived here, the more dramatic the tax
increases have been.
Pickerington, Westerville and Southwestern have all let the
residential developers and the municipal governments drive them to a crisis
position, with split sessions, modular buildings, and pay-to-play
extracurricular activities (remember that it was a residential developer who
donated the money to Pickerington Schools to they could avoid pay-to-play
while the developer still had acres of homesites to sell). We can stop this
from happening here, but only if you make a concerted effort to teach the
community that you are the good guys, not the problem.
While I believe the concepts presented are a fair
representation of our situation, I acknowledge that they may be off the mark
in particular details. I would enjoy the opportunity to work with you and
the administrators to make a more accurate presentation.
Paul Lambert
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