A little more in desperation mode, the Bossier Parish School Board followed the Bossier Police Jury’s formula regarding property tax rates, relying upon an old mythology undoubtedly implicitly adhered to by all if not eagerly propagated by at least one board member willing to display his ignorance in public.
This week, the Board met in special session to establish rates on five millages for 2024. It had been levying 65.10 mills, behind only Zachary Community, Grant Parish, and Caddo Parish schools (2022-23 data). This meeting had been postponed from last month, when the Board seemed poised to roll forward rates. Every quadrennial reassessment levied rates automatically roll back to a point where those times total value of all properties not improved and under the same ownership equals that value from four years ago times previous rates; to roll forward and go above the rolled-back rates requires a two-thirds or better votes by the taxing entity.
Bossier Parish had sent the same signal, only to back down by raising four of their five but reducing its library rate more than the total rolled forward, in essence lowering overall rates. The Board played follow-the-leader and did something similar. Of its five, only four were subject to rollback, as the debt service one at 14.50 mills is exempt, and of those four the 10.31 mills salary and benefits and 10.31 mills operations and maintenance were ineligible to roll forward because they were just recently renewed, leaving just the constitutionally-set millage of 3.41 mills (due to roll back to 3.07) and the other 26.57 mills salary and benefits (due to roll back to 23.92) available to roll forward.
So, the board had to let the pair of 10.31 mills roll back to 10 mills each, chose to roll forward the constitutional and larger salary and benefits, and voluntarily rolled back the debt service 3.5 mills to 11 mills. This drops the overall rate to 60.98 mills and is lower than the projected 61.49 mills that would have been in effect if all four were allowed to roll back with debt service untouched. For this, Chief Financial Nicia Bamburg offered a similar rationale to what the parish had explained when it lowered the library millage that had accumulated a hefty reserve with no big building plans in sight: debt service needs didn’t demand as much money coming in, and the shift could accommodate salary increases.
Of course, the district actually needs the money because of its deteriorating financial position. In 2021, after a change in accounting rules that made its unfunded accrued liabilities part of long term liabilities of forecast pension payments and other post-employment benefits, the district was in the hole $556.7 million with an operating loss of $104.8 million. In 2022, it chipped away with an operating surplus of $9.3 million but then slipped back $23.6 million in 2023. And while this year is projected to see a gain of $17.1 million, next year is forecast to be flat (a gain of around $1.7 million, and only because the Bossier Education Excellence trust fund contributes between $2 million to $2.5 million a year to all of these totals).
In other words, the ticking time bomb of the UAL isn’t being addressed nearly fast enough and the district needs to scrape together every buck it can wrangle out of the citizenry. And the cudgel used is a imaginary crisis in salaries being too low.
That line of attack was used against citizens comments to the board. A couple of them complained that if proceeds weren’t needed for bonds maybe dollars should go back to taxpayers to soften the blow of higher reassessed rates, because while for some property owners the total amount they pay will go down, for others whose assessments increased enough they will pay more despite lower rates.
This line of thinking triggered Republican Erick Falting, who at the conclusion of citizen comments made a concerted effort to give himself a terrible case of athlete’s mouth. Falting said he wanted to see a pay raise for academic year 2026 installed before the end of this year, alleging that teachers hadn’t received one in 12 years. He had some uncompromising words for citizens who didn’t want to see tax increases: “… it’s worth it to me to give a teacher pay raise. And if $257 year (a commenter said that’s how much his taxes would go up under the plan) isn’t worth it to you, then you, sir, are part of the problem of Bossier growing.”
Funny he should mention about “Bossier growing.” The parish population estimate for 2023 is 129,735, up from the 2020 census total of 128,746 and an estimate a decade ago of 124,868. But that’s not being reflected in Bossier school attendance, which last year was 22,428, 22,622 in 2020, and 22,206 in 2014.
But one thing growing about Bossier schools is their spending. In 2023, net of charges and grants the district spent over $344 million, of which about $200 million was on instruction. A decade ago, it spent about $215 million, around $127 million on instruction. In other words, with essentially a stagnant student population over the past decade (up 1 percent), overall spending has mushroomed 60 percent and instructional spending has exploded 57 percent – while inflation has increased from AY 2015 to AY 2024 just under 30 percent. Or, another way of looking at it, per pupil instructional spending went from $5,719 to $8,917, an increase 89 percent higher than the rate of inflation, and per pupil total spending went from $9,682 to $15,338, an increase of 97 percent higher than inflation.
And escalating teacher salaries have something to do with that. AY 2022 is the latest year for which data are available, but at that time Bossier teachers (excluding sabbaticals, Reserve Officer Training Corps loaned instructors, retiree rehires, and salary reductions) averaged $62,931 – seventh highest in the state – and on an hourly basis averaged $48.54 – second highest in the state. Caddo teachers averaged barely higher in annual salary but much lower on an hourly basis, and on both metrics the neighbor to the south Red River Parish averaged the highest in the state.
That annual figure is almost a 30 percent increase – almost double the rate of inflation of 16.5 percent – from the $48,552 salary figure of AY 2015, and the hourly rate increase of about 28 percent from $37.80 also well exceeds that. Back then, Bossier teachers ranked 34th and 31st.
Bamburg did bust Falting on this, telling him multiple times despite his resistance to the facts that pay raises had been given over the past decade. Some may have come in the form of supplements and others from the state, but the fact is the district didn’t go from 34th in annual salary and 31st in hourly wage to seventh and second, respectively, because other districts were cutting pay. Maybe not so much in 2014, but in 2024 it is a myth that Bossier teachers are underpaid, perpetrated as an excuse to not cut taxes because the district (and many others across the state) didn’t sock away enough money to pay for future obligations.
The companion myth, that the system is growing in students, makes the false claim that tax cuts must be off the table to service this alleged influx of students even as the number basically remains flat. Student headcount growth certainly is well behind the enormous increase in dollars spent, but the myth serves to distract taxpayers from realizing far more money is being spent for little recognizable reason.
Yet after declaring property owners as greedy by wanting to keep more of what they earned from coming under his control – calling himself “disappointed” in such folk – Falting wasn’t finished with the blame-shifting. He said if you didn’t like taxes going up that the assessor was at fault for assigning higher values to property, much like an art thief who got caught after going after a painting subsequent to its owner who bought it at a garage sale deciding to have it appraised and is told it’s a masterpiece arguing he’s not at fault because the appraiser is responsible for the crime. Taxes don’t go up or down, or even get collected, unless there’s a taxing authority putting the bite on citizens – Falting and the gang on the Board. It’s not Republican Assessor Bobby Edmiston’s fault that some Bossierite property owners will pay more to foot Board spending choices, but the Board’s unwillingness to roll back tax rates enough to prevent that.
And Falting didn’t stop at forwarding the myths of the underpaid Bossier educator and steady growth in demanding taxes to be kept up. He also tried to create a new myth that Bossier wasn’t top-heavy on the administrative side by alleging some apparently unpublicized, if not secret, “research” claimed this, alleging views to the contrary as “wrong.”
That, if such a study exists, is difficult to square with the financial facts as of 2022 if comparing instructional to non-instructional spending. Data show that the Bossier school system – which ranked 18th highest in performance in the state – spent 46.6 percent of its dollars on non-instructional purposes, which is just below the state average of 47.3 percent. But it’s well above the national average of 40 percent, indicating too much going to administration and too little to instruction on a comparative basis.
Falting alleged that the system was “losing teachers at a rapid rate.” But since they are well-paid – in fact, better paid than even the highest average pay state in the south, Georgia – and money has been going into Bossier schools, including classrooms, at a much higher rate of increase than inflation, tax revenues don’t seem to be the problem. Maybe the problem is more from the behavior of a board which passed a resolution condemning increased school choice and tries to obstruct that whenever possible when it’s not trying to water down accountability, who hired a superintendent who likens supporters of increased school choice to fans of Jim Crow and who wants to set up school clinics that cut parents out from decision-making about their children’s health, and that has ignoramuses serving on it such as Falting.
Now you get it? It’s not their policies that are the problem, it’s greedy taxpayers that resist giving up more of what they earn to allow the Board to increase its acquisition of resources, at least according to Falting. As opposed to speaking truth to power: Bossier school population isn’t growing, Bossier teachers aren’t underpaid, and Bossier schools have spent too much. And Bossier Parish School Board members do a disservice to citizens by refusing to acknowledge these realities, if not foolishly assert the opposite.
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