Over numerous meetings and school tours, a committee of Springfield residents last year came to a nearly unanimous, 22-1 consensus that the time was right to put the second phase of a multimillion bond measure before voters on April 4.
Only one member of that committee publicly said the brakes should be tapped, and he continues to argue for voters to reject Proposition S, the name of the ballot measure.
“The problem is not the projects, but the timing,” Carl Herd, a rental property owner and retired teacher, said during the public speaker portion of the Dec. 13 Springfield Public Schools Board of Education meeting. That day, he brought with him to the podium a piece of paper that nearly equaled his wingspan. The cost of the bond measure — $220,000,000 — was written on it in red ink.
Pushing pause on the bond process and putting it up for a vote a year later is a message Herd has repeated recently at group meetings — and during interviews he has recently requested with media members. But since the bond vote is on ballots next month, he's advocating against it. Herd, a former Pershing teacher who retired from the district in 1993 and now owns eight rental properties, points to recent declines in enrollment, anticipated increases in property taxes and a need for the school district to focus on academics as his top reasons for opposing the measure.
“I don't think they can do a bond program and turn the district around, academically, at the same time,” Herd said in an interview with the Daily Citizen. “Now, they'd argue differently.”
Indeed, they would.
“I don't think anyone's going to say, ‘(Build) a new building and our students will score better,” said John Mulford, SPS deputy superintendent. “No one believes that. But again, it's about optimizing the learning environment. And I think anyone who would argue against that — I don't know. It just leaves me scratching my head.”
District leaders and bond proponents have different views than Herd on many matters related to Proposition S. At the heart of many arguments in favor of the bond is a point that the need is not going away, even if the vote is coming at a challenging economic time.
“His statement at the time was that he supported the bond issue, but that he wanted the bond issue to occur in April of 2024 instead of April of 2023,” said Bridget Dierks, a co-chair of the task force. ” “But the committee as a whole, other than Carl, really felt strongly that there was no reason to wait an additional year to solve major issues in buildings that are of abysmal condition scores. So the idea that we would just sit on these projects for schools that are 52 out of 100 on condition score, 59 of 100 on condition score, simply to see if conditions were different a year from now, did not seem a worthwhile effort. In the end, everyone (else) saw the pressing need.”
Many of those views were aired during the monthslong process undertaken in 2022 by the community task force on facilities. The group toured schools deemed most in need of renovations, additions or complete rebuilds. Last fall, it presented a set of consensus recommendations to the school board centered around the bond measure’s dollar amount and what projects the money should fund.
The projects and the prices tied to Proposition S
- A new Pipkin Middle School, ideally on a new, more spacious site ($53 million)
- Safety upgrades, including new storm shelter-gymnasiums at six elementary schools and other security measures — including new cameras and shatter-resistant film covering for all first-floor windows — installed across the district ($37.3 million)
- A renovated Pershing K-8 ($50.5 million) that might become a middle school depending on the findings of a district demographics study
- A new Reed Academy ($59.5 million)
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Enrollment trends a concern of Herd’s, and a focus of district demographics study
Last year, Herd presented a minority report to board members explaining the reasons for his dissenting vote while on the committee. He gave a copy to the Daily Citizen this month. In it, Herd pointed to declining enrollment across the district as his top reason for opposing the bond measure that would build new schools. He said he was concerned about building new classrooms that could sit empty based on enrollment trends. In the last full pre-COVID school year (2018-2019), there were 24,924 students enrolled at SPS, according to that year’s annual report. By 2020-2021, the number had dropped to 23,142.
“You can't predict what the enrollment numbers are going to be,” Herd said. “That's very true. But the winds are kind of blowing in the wrong direction. That's my take on enrollment, and the best way to counteract that is to be so good at what we teach the kids that parents would not be enticed to go to these other routes. They're focusing too much on buildings and not enough on achievement. That's my strong point there.”
Herd, in his report, tried to account for where students have gone. He gathered information from two neighboring districts, which showed enrollment increases of several hundred students from 2018 to 2022 in Republic and Nixa. He pointed to a Springfield Business Journal article showing a 21 percent increase in area private school enrollment from 2019 to 2022. Herd also tried unsuccessfully to track down local homeschool data, but nationally, about 11 percent of households had a homeschooled student during the pandemic, according to a U.S. Census study.
“If (SPS) continues to lose students, then there needs to be some rethinking on buildings,” Herd said.
Mulford said one of the most dangerous things you can do with school district data is look back a year or two. “You’ve got to look over time to see what kind of trends there are,” he said.
The 2021-2022 annual report showed 5,460 students were enrolled in middle schools across the district. Look back a decade to 2011-2012 figures, and the total number of middle school students in the district added up to 5,412. That same year, there were 11,871 students enrolled in the district, compared with 10,512 as of the latest annual report.
Mulford said the comparable number of middle school students supports the decision to target Pipkin and Reed Academy, which are housed in century-old buildings, as rebuilds. With both schools having choice programming — Pipkin offers International Baccalaureate classes while Reed is ramping up its performing arts offerings — the new facilities could draw more students from across the district to those schools.
But the elementary school data over time, Mulford said, has shown some significant variance, he said. That’s why Mulford and Travis Shaw, the district’s executive director of operations, recommended that the district hit pause on addressing elementary projects targeted by the committee until demographics and boundaries studies are conducted to help determine what capacity any new or renovated buildings need to accommodate. (A $31.7 million Robberson Community School rebuild fell just short of a top-four ranking among the committee members. A $22.7 million renovation to Bingham Elementary ranked sixth on the priority list.) It will also help determine if Pershing should make the switch from K-8 to a middle school.
“We do have questions too around elementary enrollment, what is really needed there, and that's why the board went the way they went,” Mulford said. “Middle school, however, the enrollment there. It has stayed pretty consistent.
“Depending on what the study tells us, (Pershing) could remain a K-8, and maybe the elementary portion needs to be expanded to serve more kids. It could become a middle school only. Maybe those elementary kids are better served at a neighboring elementary. We don't know. But we also don't want to assume either. So we really want the study to guide our thinking, and we want to be as efficient as we can with the taxpayers' resources and makes sure that whatever direction we go with that campus is going to be the best to meet the long-term need.”
Herd, Mulford address financial commitment at challenging economic time.
Unlike Friends of SPS, the pro-Prop S committee that is registered with the Missouri Ethics Commission and whose ads will start running on local TV Wednesday in support of the bond, Herd is presenting his case against the bond measure as an individual. The paperwork he has handed out reads, “Paid for by Carl Herd. Member of the SPS Community Task Force.”
That doesn’t mean he is alone. Nearly 9,400 people, or about 39 percent of voters, voted against the Proposition S measure on the 2019 ballot. (Over 14,800 people supported Prop S that year.) It remains to be seen how the 2023 vote will compare to that one. Mulford said the decision not to raise, but instead extend, the current tax levy could factor into how the vote splits this time.
While Herd has advocated for a pause, Mulford pointed out that the wheels have been in motion since voters approved the $168 million bond measure in 2019, the first of three phases of bond votes initially mapped out by a 2018 community task force. (Many of the members of the 2018 task force re-enlisted in 2022. Herd was one of several members serving for the first time this year.) That 2019 decision led to a set of two tax increases that upped the debt service levy for property owners who reside in the school district to 73 cents. The district’s bond advisors project SPS debts from that ballot measure to be paid off by approximately 2040. The 2023 ballot measure would extend the current debt service levy for an additional four to five years, based on SPS presentations. If voters rejected the measure, the levy won’t decrease as a result.
How does a debt-service levy work? (Click to expand the story)
Voters in 2019 approved an increase in the Springfield Public School District tax levy to fund infrastructure improvements across the district. The levy now stands at 73 cents, and it’s applied to every $100 of assessed property value in the district. Property is taxed at different rates depending on the type. At a fall 2022 meeting, John Mulford, SPS deputy superintendent, provided this example to show how that levy currently impacts a taxpayer with a $200,000 home and a $25,000 car:
Personal home assessed at $200,000 x 19 percent tax rate = $38,000 assessed value
Personal vehicle assessed at $25,000 x 33.33 percent tax rate = $8,333 assessed value
Total assessed value = $46,333
Divided by 100 = $463.33
Multiplied by $.73 debt service levy = $338.23 annual tax, or $28.19 per month
(The levy also comes into play with commercial and agricultural property. Missouri’s commercial property tax rate is 32 percent, and the agricultural property tax rate is 12 percent.)
Herd said he finds the language around the extension of the debt service levy to be “disingenuine.”
“That’s a true statement,” he said. “But they’re not telling you the whole truth.”
While the tax rate won’t increase, Herd said it’s widely expected that real estate property values will climb when assessed later this year. That happened recently with personal property values. Herd said, “we’re going to get hit with more taxes.”
That’s a reality that was discussed by school board members in the lead-up to the vote on putting Proposition S on the ballot, and it is also baked into projections of when the district will pay off its bond loans. With the current 73-cent debt levy, Brent Blevins, managing director of Stifel, the district’s public finance brokerage firm, told the school board last year that assessed property values would need to increase by 9.9 percent over the next two decades to pay off the debt. In the past two years, it has grown by nearly 12 percent, he said. In the past 20 years, it’s grown by nearly 80 percent. Blevins said last year the district's conservative approach has it in good shape to put forward a bond issue even in the midst of increasing interest rates and inflation.
In Missouri, the onus falls heavily on district taxpayers to fund their public schools. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, Missouri ranked 47th out of 50 states as of 2018-2019 in terms of total public school revenues coming from state sources. In Missouri, 32 percent of funds come from the state. Missouri statute also caps how much money a district is allowed to ask its voters to borrow — “an amount not to exceed 15 percent of the value of such taxable tangible property.”
Last September, Blevins told the task force that the taxable property in the district was then valued at just over $4.1 billion, meaning the district could borrow up to nearly $622 million if the goal was to hit the 15-percent cap. Springfield had the capacity to ask voters on April 4 for up to $329 million, Blevins said then, based on the district’s debt ($310 million) and as of June 30. He later told the school board that the $220 million bond issuance supported by nearly all of the community task force was an “ultra-conservative” ask of voters.
“I think it was a clear message that the need is there,” Mulford said. “Now, within those people who voted for it, there was a pretty loud voice that said, ‘We see the need, we want to address the need and we don't want to go overboard on addressing the need.' And I think that's the same sentiment that our board shares, our administration shares.”
The board unanimously approved putting the bond measure on April 4 ballots.
