Wylie ISD is a great school district with good facilities and awesome teachers! Folks have figured this out. As a result, we have many families intentionally moving into our school district. We are a big school system with more than 15,000 students, 2000 employees and a $126,000,000 budget to support us.
We grow around 500 students a year. As we grow, we need more faculty and staff and eventually, facilities to support them. We fund our budget with a combination of state and local taxes, with a small portion of federal funding as well.
Your local property taxes are the biggest source of funding and we really appreciate your support. Property values have drastically increased the past few years. It is important to us that you understand where the money from your property taxes go.
Increases in home values do not mean a lot more money for the school collecting taxes. For every additional dollar we raise in Wylie ISD, the State of Texas reduces that amount by seventy-five cents.
When our values go up, the state contribution effort goes down. More specifically, we are projecting the following increases in property values and budgeting the following based on those increases.
These dollars go toward funding additional teachers to accommodate student growth, transportation, facilities etc. You might be asking, where does the money go that the state keeps? We have provided the following graphic below to explain where those dollars go.
Those dollars go to fund property poor school districts. In fact, the state used these increases in local property taxes as the only source of funding for increases in school district budgets. There was about $400,000,000 of these funds that did not go back into public education at all.
The point to this information is that schools are not benefiting from the total amount of your property value increases in Wylie ISD. The story is the same for Frisco ISD, Plano ISD and other districts in Collin County. These funds are broadly used for the entire state education system. Our legislators are calling for property tax reform and we join them in that pursuit. Schools are the biggest line on your tax bill. Texas currently ranks 42 out of 50 in school funding nationally and that needs to improve. However, any increases do not need to come from local property taxes.
As always, I welcome your questions, concerns and ideas. david.vinson@wylieisd.net
