Voters in the Bryant School District voted against a millage increase Tuesday that would have helped the growing district improve its existing facilities and build new ones.
Complete but unofficial results are:
For 2,635
Against 2,643
The special election asked for a 4.9-mill increase to the current 37.2 mills, adding $98 to the $744 that the owner of a $100,000 house now pays annually in school property taxes.
"Eight votes is tough to take, but it is what it is and we're going to do the best for the kids we possibly can," Bryant School District Superintendent Tom Kimbrell said. "We developed a plan and put it out there, and asked [the public] to invest in it, and more people said that what we got is good enough and try a different way."
The millage increase would have helped the district complete the second and third phases of a 10-year plan to help accommodate enrollment growth.
Kimbrell told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette last week that the school district averages about 300 new students each year. In the 2010-11 academic year, the district had 7,949 students. This year, it has 9,017. In a decade, administrators expect it to have more than 11,800 students.
Keeping up with that growth without the millage increase will "require a great deal of investigation into the programs we currently support, the number of opportunities our kids have, what we do with scheduling, the use of teacher time," Kimbrell said.
"It's going to mean some drastic changes in what and how we deliver education in Bryant," he said.
The district has received $21.4 million in state partnership funds and has used about $3.1 million of those funds on current projects, including fixing the high school's roof. Without the millage increase, the district will have to return remaining state funds being used to help upgrade facilities.
To get the rest of the state funds, the district had to come up with its share of matching funds, which officials hoped to raise through the millage increase.
"Those remaining dollars that we didn't spend or won't spend as we are completing these construction projects ... will go back to the state to be used in other school districts that do find their match," Kimbrell said.
The district's 10-year plan included three phases. Projects in the first phase are either completed or underway because of sales from second-lien bonds and the district's building fund.
The second and third phases, which the millage increase would have supported, included construction of a new elementary school and middle school, converting Bryant Middle School to a junior high, building an arena and a performance-arts facility, and adding a cafeteria to the high school.
The defeat by voters of a millage increase is the second in 13 months for the school district. A 4.7-mill increase was supported by only 40 percent of the voters on Feb. 11, 2014.
Kimbrell said Tuesday night that it was too early to say when the district might seek another millage increase.
"The state is going to require us to develop a plan with the dollars we have and the funds that we currently have to make sure that we are housing these kids," he said. "We'll just do what we have to do, and make some decisions that are going to be tough decisions. My goal is that we'll make decisions that don't impact kids directly."
District voters last approved a millage increase -- of 3.9 mills -- in 2009.
A mill is one-tenth of 1 cent. One mill levied on an assessed value of $1,000 yields $1 in property taxes. Arkansas counties assess property at 20 percent of appraised value, so a $100,000 house has an assessed value of $20,000. That $20,000 multiplied by the rejected 0.0049 boost would have generated the $98 tax increase.
Metro on 03/11/2015