TAMU-CC Students Use Hacking Skills for Good<\/a><\/p>\nIt\u2019s called a Voter-Approval Tax Rate Election, or VATRE, and it\u2019s a bit of school finance alphabet soup that\u2019s easier to understand than it sounds. District leaders say Proposition A would let them shift how local tax dollars are divided possibly sending a little more to classrooms and teacher pay without changing the total tax rate.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s how that works:
The total tax rate stays at $0.8088, the same as last year. But the Maintenance and Operations rate, the part that funds salaries, classroom supplies, and student programs, would rise about four percent, from $0.6669 to $0.6969. At the same time, the Interest and Sinking rate, which covers debt, would drop from $0.1419 to $0.1119.<\/p>\n
Bottom line: same total rate, but more flexibility for the district.<\/p>\n
That change would generate more than $936,000 for daily operations. And because Aransas Pass\u2019s per-student funding is below the state average, the state would kick in another $572,000 in matching funds.<\/p>\n
Interim Superintendent Wayne Bennett says without voter approval, that extra funding is off the table. \u201cWithout this proposition, we miss out on an opportunity for these additional funds,\u201d he said. \u201cIt keeps us in a place that is a budgetary constraint.\u201d<\/p>\n
District Communications Director Blaise Miller added that the wording on the ballot doesn\u2019t make it clear what\u2019s really happening. \u201cThe ballot language doesn\u2019t truly explain the impact of what a VATRE would do for the district if it were to be passed,\u201d Miller said.<\/p>\n
So, when voters head to the polls, they\u2019ll see the words \u201ctax increase.\u201d But for Aransas Pass ISD, it\u2019s more about a smarter use of the same dollars, a way to keep good teachers in the classroom and improve student support without actually raising the overall rate.<\/p>\n
The district says the decision is now up to the community: vote for or against. Either way, this election will determine how much flexibility Aransas Pass schools have to invest in their students moving forward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Same tax rate, nearly $1 million more for classrooms. CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas \u2014 Voters in Aransas Pass are…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30223,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[155,157,156],"class_list":["post-30222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-corpus-christi","tag-corpus-christi","tag-corpus-christi-headlines","tag-corpus-christi-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30222\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}