Levy seeks $265,000 increase

Voters in the Wallace School District will do something Tuesday they did last year and probably will do again next year: decide whether to give the district money for the coming school year.

Unlike most school districts, Wallace has been operating on one-year supplemental levies instead of two-year levies. The proposed levy amount for next year is $1.4 million, about $265,000 more than this year’s levy.

“It’s an increase based on necessities,” said district Superintendent Bob Ranells. “It’s not an enhancement levy. It’s a maintenance-of-current-programs levy.”

The increase will cover the inflationary costs of current operations and will make sure there’s enough money to replace textbooks and give the raises the Legislature is expected to approve this year. The district has more staff members than the Legislature funds, Ranells said.

District officials also assume that the timber payments the district has received the past six years under the federal Craig-Wyden Act won’t be available next year. Congress has not reauthorized the program, which pays rural communities that historically received a share of revenues from timber harvests on national forest lands.

Ranells estimated the $1.4 million levy would account for about a quarter of the district’s operating budget next year.

Although the proposed levy rate is less than the one voters approved a year ago, district residents may end up paying more taxes for schools because of rising home prices.

“The market values are just going off the Richter scale and we don’t have any control over that,” Ranells said.

But the Wallace community has always been supportive of school levies, he added. “They’ve grown to realize that, in order for us to have the programs that we want to have and to have low teacher-student ratios in the lower grades, we’re going to have to have a levy.”

The district and school board haven’t discussed what to do if the levy fails. They hope that, as in past years, they won’t have to.

“Will it dramatically affect us if we don’t have the levy? Absolutely,” Ranells said. “The board has no desire to spend time discussing those issues.”

Ranells said he’s been talking to as many people in the community as he can about the proposed levy.

“Anyone that stands and listens to me, I’ll talk to,” Ranells said. “I want people to just understand the situation we’re in. It isn’t rocket science and it isn’t anything new.”

The district includes about 550 students in preschool through grade 12 from the Wallace, Silverton, Osborn and Prichard-Murray areas.