Schools

School District Asking Voters to Pay for Building Repairs, More Classrooms, Tech Levy

The St. Louis Park school district is working on referendum questions to pose to voters in the fall.

The St. Louis Park school district is facing rising enrollment, aging buildings and the expiration of a technology levy passed in the 1990s—and this fall the district will be asking residents to vote on a number of funding referendums.

The district will be fine-tuning referendum questions and releasing its tax impact analysis in the coming weeks, but the district’s rough estimate is that voters will be asked to pay about $15 million for capital repairs and improvements to buildings and for additional all-day kindergarten classroom space.

Additionally, a 15-year technology levy is set to expire in spring 2015, and the district will ask voters to renew the levy, which funds, infrastructure, equipment and staff, at the cost of roughly $1.75 million per year for the next 15 years.

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“It’s important that our technology is reliable and up-to-date,” St. Louis Park superintendent Robert Metz told the city council during a joint meeting on Monday. “The fact that we’re running our tech through buildings that are 60 years old makes it more difficult to keep up.”

Metz called the district’s growing enrollment  “a very happy story.” But new classrooms are scheduled to open at Aquila, Susan Lindgren and Peter Hobart in the fall at the cost of around $5 million.

Find out what's happening in St. Louis Parkwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Metz said that there have been questions about why the district is expanding classroom space just a few years after closing Cedar Manor but that the cost to operate a separate building totals about half a million dollars, the equivalent of ten teaching positions.

The school board will hold a work session to discuss referendum options and tax impacts on Aug. 5 before approving the final ballot questions on Aug. 13.


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