A MS Coast school board considers property tax increase, layoffs after heated meeting

Facing an impending budget shortfall of $2.3 million in the coming academic year — followed by a likely loss of $6 million in revenue in 2027 when a county coal plant will be decommissioned — the Jackson County School District is considering raising ad valorem taxes.

The proposed 4% tax increase, along with superintendent John Strycker’s request to enlarge the district’s budget, led to a heated exchanges at the Monday school board meeting in Vancleave.

One school board member, District 1 representative Glenn Dickerson, said he would not vote to support the budget Strycker proposed unless expenditures were reduced.

In next year’s proposed budget, Dickerson noted, the district maintenance fund (which accounts for the lion’s share of expenditures) includes $75.4 million in expenditures—up from $68 million in 2021 and $65 million in 2020, Strycker’s first year on the job.

Plant Daniel, a power plant near Hurley, currently operates both a natural gas plant and a coal-burning plant. When the latter will be decommissioned in 2027, district business manager Ryan Earley said the district will lose some $6 million in revenue.

“I foresee this being the long-term solution to the coal plant’s closure,” Earley said.

Tthe Jackson County School District is unusually dependent on ad valorem taxes, Earley said. “I think we are top 15 in the state when it comes to that. So a big burden is placed on our taxpayers, more so than maybe some other neighboring districts of ours.”

If the Jackson County School Board approves the property tax increase, it must also get approval from the Board of Supervisors and tax assessor.

Cutting administrative costs in Coast district

In a series of heated exchanges, Dickerson and the superintendent argued over whether the upward trend in expenditures during Strycker’s tenure was justified.

“We’re going in the wrong direction,” said Dickerson.

“Not when our kids come back to school and have higher achievement,” Strycker shot back.

Strycker stood by his reasons for increasing costs during the COVID-19 pandemic, and said he has been clear with the school board and public all along about his fiscal strategy.

Presenting figures on how students have been retained through the difficult coronavirus years, and how academic achievement has risen, Strycker presented the increased expenditures as a necessary investment in the district’s students, funded in part by an influx of federal COVID funding which he said will soon dry up.

Strycker also said the increased expenditures so far have not gone to administrative salaries. He plans to introduce a proposal to reduce administrative costs by reducing the number of assistant superintendents from three to two, as part of a general reorganization plan in which the district administration will be centralized in Vancleave.

Instead of going “to the top,” Strycker said, the increased expenditures have funded the salaries of personnel like custodians and bus drivers, who are in short supply at schools during a tight labor market.

The news of this proposed centralization plan comes in the wake of the stormy exit of the third assistant superintendent, Mary Tanner, who won an undisclosed settlement from the district after she sued Strycker for gender and age discrimination and deprivation of due process in an investigation.

Layoffs imminent in school district

Dickerson also questioned Strycker on hiring a “tremendous number of central office personnel” during the pandemic using COVID relief funds, which are not recurring revenue sources.

But Strycker said all personnel whose positions are funded with the aid money were informed at the outset they could be laid off.

”We make it clear to those people we hired that when the ESSER funding is no longer there their jobs may not be there,” he said, referring to the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund implemented through the CARES Act.

Some of these layoffs are already imminent, he said.