Happy New Year. I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and I wish you a safe, happy, and successful new year.
Thank you for your support and interest over the past years. Your contribution with money and voting has sustained NKTA in achieving cost-efficient use of your tax dollar in our school district. The schools represent 75% to 80% of our property taxes. Since NKTA’s founding in 2015, our work has held these taxes level, while reallocating existing tax dollars to drive for improving results for students. Further details are stated below.
Now it’s time again for our annual NKTA Dues drive. The funding from the annual $20/family dues as well as additional generous member donations enable our annual Election flyers to promote candidates and causes that support our mission. Please consider joining to keep wise use of our property tax dollars going.
The taxpayers of our communities have been very generous to the schools and towns in our district and NKTA has been a powerful voice in insisting that we get value for the money being spent. We have also been focused on ensuring that the costs to our taxpayers be sustainable and that spending should be transparent.
Value: NKTA has been at the forefront of forcing accountability and student achievement as a focus of the School district.
Transparency: School board meetings and Subcommittee meetings are all recorded and available for review.
Communication with families: A new reporting system and Letter grades are coming back to the school system in fiscal year 2023 (some have already started)
Curriculum: The Everyday Math program that has been an unmitigated failure, has been eliminated and replaced with a new Math curriculum (Envision) that is far more robust for the K-6th grades. The Math Curriculum is also being updated for the 7th-12th grade this year.
Facilities: The Middle School was rented out and the savings was split between intervention program for the kids and refunds to the taxpayers.
I could continue with many more examples, but I think this suffices to demonstrate the focus on accountability and getting value for our money. Not only is improved student performance critical to the well being of our children, it is also critical to our property values. Higher performing districts improve property values.
As to ensuring that we have a sustainable tax situation for our communities the below shows where actual spending has been for the most recent years.
School year 2015/2016 $33.644M
School year 2016/2017 $33.468M
School year 2017/2018 $33.717M
School year 2018/2019 $34.393M
School year 2019/2020 $34.164M
Over a 5-year period, this is a total increase of 1.5% (or roughly 0.3% per year).
We need your help to continue this good work. Please send in your donation today.
Thank you and have a great New Year
Jamie Fitzpatrick, Treasurer
OR You can contribute using Paypal by going to the NKTA site https://nkta.vpweb.com/contact-and-membership and using the section that looks like this image.