The Habersham County Board of Education (HabCo BOE) held its first of three millage rate public hearings Monday morning. Only two citizens attended the hearing, but both asked the board members several questions.
The Board has elected not to roll back the millage rate for 2024, a move the school board has not made in over a decade. Board members said the decision is based on the state passing on costs.
One such unfunded mandate is employee insurance, which will increase by $1,377,720 for the next school year. Another cost is employee pay raises. Classified employees will receive a 4.1% raise. The state will cover the Governor’s $2,500 increase in teachers’ salaries that fall within the QBE formula. However, for teachers outside the formula, the school board will match those employees’ raises. Those employees include band teachers, art/music teachers, and some special education teachers.
The cost of pay raises for non-QBE positions in Habersham will be $847,807.
Another cost not covered by the state is the retention of 46 positions covered by the American Rescue Plan grant. That grant will expire in September. It will cost the school board $2,766,689 to retain those positions.
Public comments
Jim Hudak of Clarkesville questioned the retention of the 46 employees. He asked when the employees were hired and did they know that there was limited funding for those positions? Chief Financial Officer Staci Newsome told Hudak that the employees were hired three years ago and that they did know that they were hired with limited funding.
He asked if they were teaching positions or administrative positions. Newsome responded that they were a mixture.
Newsome presented a slide demonstrating the millage rates of 15 school districts in the northeast Georgia region. It demonstrated that Habersham County Schools was third lowest in the region.
Guy Keirn of Clarkesville asked, “What’s the cost per student for each one?” Newsome responded that she had not figured out the cost per student for each district. She offered to factor that cost for Keirn. She added that the price per student could be found at the Georgia Department of Education website.
Keirn had another concern he expressed to the board members. “It’s always a concern with the exponential growth of the budget. I’m worried about the people that have lived here a long time, that the reassessment, I’m concerned for people on fixed income.”
He recently moved from Florida “because of things like this.” He added that he retired from government work. Keirn asked the board members not to take his next comment personally. “We waste a lot of money,” he said.
School Superintendent Matthew Cooper addressed Keirn and said that the question shouldn’t be how much is being spent but “what is the community getting in return for what’s being spent?” Cooper told Keirn that the school system ranked in the top ten in the state with graduation rates for the last three years out of 180 school systems throughout the state.
Challenges
Cooper said Habersham County has some unique challenges when compared to the region. The size of the system, being one of them.
“We broke 1,000 students last year, students that don’t speak English as their primary language.” He added that the system had a large number of special education students, and all of those students needed to be served.
Cooper told Keirn that the board decided years ago to keep Woodville and Hazel Grove Elementary Schools open, a decision that many school systems would not have made. He said they would have closed those schools because of their size to save money. He added that Habersham has a 9th-grade academy. Many school systems did away with those to save money.
He added that the board decided to have an alternative school that costs money. Over the last eight years, that school prevented over 300 students from dropping out of school and receiving their diplomas, and they are now contributing to society.
With the challenges the school board faces, “A lot of boards in this situation would have probably raised the millage rate with these challenges we are having,” Cooper said. He added that the school board will be taking it year to year and look at rolling the millage rate back in the future.
Tax exemption
Hudak told the board members that he and his wife have been retired for several years and are on fixed incomes. They also have seen health insurance increases. He told the board, “It’s getting tougher and tougher to make ends meet.”
Cooper pointed out that the county offered an exemption that exempted those 65 years of age and older from paying the school tax. He told Hudak that there was an income provision in the exemption.
Chairman Doug Westmoreland closed the millage rate public hearing after comments.
The next public hearing will be held at 5:30 p.m. Monday, July 15. The final millage rate public hearing will be at 6 p.m. on Monday, July 22. Both hearings will be held in the Habersham County Board of Education Meeting Room at 144 Holcomb Street in Clarkesville.
