Fairfield school board to hear presentation on tax levies Tuesday, Jan. 16

FAIRFIELD – The Fairfield Community School District invites the public to learn more about the district’s finances either in-person or through a livestream of the Tuesday, Jan. 16 school board meeting that will feature a special guest.

The meeting will begin at 6:30 p.m. in the district’s ACT building at 403 S. 20th St., and it will be livestreamed on the district’s website at www.fairfieldsfuture.org.

The district has invited Matthew Gillaspie, Managing Director of Education at Piper Sandler Companies, to speak about how property tax levies work, and how a change in a levy affects a resident’s tax bill, and how it’s different for land that is classified residential, agricultural or commercial.

“We’ll go into more depth about what tax levies are used for,” Gillaspie told The Union. “We might talk about what other school districts levy, and we’ll talk about the process of borrowing money and the process for a bond issue, if the school wants to do that.”

Gillaspie said that his firm works with 85-90 percent of school districts in Iowa, and that he’s been working with the Fairfield school district close to 20 years. He said that schools in general are in better financial shape than they were 10-15 years ago, when it was more common for them to borrow money just to pay their routine bills.

“Almost no school in the state needs to do that now,” he said. “The financial health of our schools has improved dramatically.”

At the same time, the Fairfield school district has learned that it will need to make some changes to address a projected budget shortfall. Earlier this school year, the board learned that it had overspent its revenues by $1.3 million last fiscal year, and that it was projected to overspend revenues by $1.4 million next fiscal year, too.

A number of factors have contributed to Fairfield’s financial picture, and one of those is the district’s falling enrollment. The school district’s certified enrollment for the 1999-2000 school year was 2,188.8, and now 24 years later it is 1,525.8, a drop of more than 600 students.

Gillaspie said he understood how losing a few students every year could snowball into a financial problem.

“When you only lose two or three per grade, that’s not enough to eliminate teachers,” he said. “Whether you have 21 or 19 kids in a class, you still need a teacher. That’s what a lot of people don’t understand. It’s not that simple, and the school district does not have a lot of choice in these matters.”

Gillaspie had been scheduled to appear before the school board during a work session on Tuesday, Jan. 9, but that was canceled due to inclement weather. Gillaspie will be the second financial expert to address the board in the last month. In early December, Larry Sigel of Iowa School Finance Information Systems (ISFIS) gave a presentation on the district’s finances, and recommended a near-term budget cut of $800,000 to $1.6 million.

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Call Andy Hallman at 641-575-0135 or email him at andy.hallman@southeastiowaunion.com