Redwood City voters are about to get another big school funding question on their June 2 ballots. Hoping to shore up teacher pay and protect classroom programs, Redwood City School District trustees this week signed off on an eight-year parcel tax measure that district officials say would pull in roughly $12.2 million a year.
The new charge would sit on top of the district's existing parcel levy, not replace it, and is billed as a way to head off more staffing cuts and keep hands-on instruction in place. At a special meeting, the board voted to call the election, according to Redwood City School District.
The district says the measure would park all proceeds in a separate account, require annual independent audits and set up a citizens oversight committee so residents can keep tabs on how the money gets spent.
What's on the ballot
The proposal would charge 17.5 cents per building square foot, as reported by the San Mateo Daily Journal. For a 1,000-square-foot home, that pencils out to about $175 a year. The tax would come with a cap on total charges and exemptions for seniors, while unimproved parcels would be hit with a $25 flat fee.
If voters say yes, the levy would run for eight years.
How the district would use the money
District leaders are pitching the tax as a classroom-first measure. According to Redwood City School District, the money would go toward keeping and recruiting teachers and classroom aides, funding counselors and reading specialists and protecting science, math and arts programs while helping keep class sizes manageable.
The same district resolution spells out the accountability pieces, stating that parcel tax dollars must be placed in a separate account and checked through annual independent audits.
How the money would be split
A draft spending plan shown to trustees carves the new money into two big buckets: districtwide programs and individual school sites. Each school would get a $50,000 base amount plus extra funding based on enrollment and unduplicated pupil counts, the San Mateo Daily Journal reports.
Draft figures presented to the board put annual site allocations, excluding charter schools, between about $298,338 and $685,525. On a per-student basis, that works out to roughly $543 to $1,143 more per year.
Local reaction and next steps
Parent organizers with Strong Schools for Redwood City, who had been pursuing their own citizen parcel tax initiative, say they are standing down that separate effort and will instead raise money to support the district-backed measure, according to Redwood City Pulse and the group's website.
Not everyone is sold. Critics, including a representative of the Silicon Valley Taxpayers Association, told trustees they want clearer long-term fiscal planning before the district asks voters to dig deeper into their pockets, Redwood City Pulse reported.
What voters need to know
Because the school board itself is placing the measure on the ballot, it will need a two-thirds supermajority to pass. Recent court rulings have created a separate path for citizen-sponsored tax measures, which can pass with a simple majority, a legal wrinkle explained by Ed100.
Campaigns also face a compressed calendar. San Mateo County's election schedule lists March 6 as the key 88-day deadline for filing measure documents ahead of the June 2 election, leaving only a few weeks for organizers to mount their outreach and draft ballot arguments, according to the county calendar.
