Jack Parker
HANCOCK COUNTY — Property owners in Mt. Vernon Community School Corporation’s district will see a new tax next year after a majority of voters there opted in favor of a referendum in the primary election.
Mt. Vernon’s leader said it will allow the corporation to sustain its operations funding, ultimately leading to continued low class sizes, more compensation for teachers and additional student resource officers.
By the time all the votes were tallied Tuesday night, 1,746 were in favor of the referendum and 1,437 were against, representing about a 55%/45% split.
The new tax is 17 cents per $100 of assessed value from 2023 through 2030.
For a home with a gross assessed value of $200,000, assuming multiple deductions residential property owners can be eligible for, that comes out to an estimated nearly $14 a month, or over $166 a year.
Mt. Vernon has an online calculator property owners can use to determine how the new tax will be estimated to affect them at mvcsc.k12.in.us/content/1110.
The extra tax will affect residences, commercial properties and agricultural properties at their tax caps as well. Mt. Vernon’s district is made up of Buck Creek and Vernon townships in western and northwestern Hancock County.
“While we have great projections on the growth of our assessed valuation and the economy, if we find ourselves in the future not needing all 17 cents because of some unexpected additional growth or economical positives, we wouldn’t ask to take all 17 cents,” said Jack Parker, Mt. Vernon superintendent. “But that would be consideration for the future. We will never ask for more than we need, and we will never take more than we need.”
The tax is expected to bring in about $3.2 million annually. Parker said that will help the school corporation maintain the stability of its operations fund after the loss of increment permitted by the state.
In 2012, as Mt. Vernon experienced financial duress, the state allowed the school corporation to restructure its debt over a period of 10 years, which has provided about $3.4 million annually over nine of those years and $2.1 million the final year.
That’s been supporting operating expenses like buses, bus drivers, fuel, custodians, cleaning supplies, utilities and other costs.
Parker noted the corporation’s operations fund is much smaller than its education fund, which can support the operations fund much more than Mt. Vernon is currently using it to do so. This will ultimately allow Mt. Vernon to maintain low class sizes, he continued.
“We want to keep as much money in the education fund as possible so that we can keep our class sizes relatively low,” Parker said. “We are very fortunate to have relatively low average class sizes in our district.”
He added it will also allow for additional compensation for teachers and classified staff who continue to recover from a five-year pay freeze, helping Mt. Vernon to become more comparable with other schools and job opportunities. More school resource officers will be able to be placed in school buildings throughout the district as well, Parker said.
“It’s going to provide a lot of positive benefits for us to maintain the success we’ve been working toward, and we’re very happy that we’re going to be able to do that,” he said.
Parker said he was grateful and humbled that the community put its faith in the school corporation as they partner to support student learning. He added he thinks the effort the school corporation put toward that partnership allowed the referendum to prevail.
“We’d been working to partner with our community for a very long time and to provide outreach, availability, transparency for many years, and we feel like we’ve been building a great relationship with our community, and that we built trust, and we can attribute, I think, the success of this referendum to the relationship that we have within our community, and it’s just so appreciated,” he said.
Mt. Vernon hosted multiple public meetings on the topic since the school board first approved adding the question to the ballot last December.
“We did provide a lot of outreach to tell our story,” Parker said. “We’re proud of our story and the work that we had done to use our resources very responsibly.”
