The District 117 Board of Education passed a resolution Wednesday night to set up the payment method for the new school in the Murrayville-Woodson area.
The resolution says that the new building is going to be built on the basis of expanding kindergarten and pre-kindergarten space rather than as a health-life-safety need. With that designation, Superintendent Steve Ptacek says it guarantees that property tax revenues will not be used to build the new school: “Now that the [State of Illinois] has opened this up, it allows the school to be built without a referendum. What we have been saying to the community is there won’t be a property tax extra payment added on for the new building. If we went the route of the Health-Life-Safety bond, we could say that but we did have [adding property tax] as an option. They passed a new law that with forcing full-day kindergarten throughout the state and putting money into Early Years and Pre-K that if you are expanding your kindergarten space, which we are putting in two kindergarten classrooms expecting growth compared to Murrayville-Woodson, and we are creating an actual dedicated Early Years space in the new building instead of just using a temporary space that we have been using in the current building. We are with this passed resolution able to build the new building but we are not able to use property taxes for it. This is going to limit the district to just the alternative revenue bonds, which is our sales tax bonds, that we have done all of our other buildings with and excess fund balance.”
Ptacek says the resolution is the first step in the process as required by the state under the new law. The school board pulled a resolution on Wednesday night from the agenda to purchase property on which the new building would be built.
Ptacek says that action on a property purchase is pending, possibly happening before the next regular scheduled school board meeting in April. He said to “stay tuned” for an alert for a special meeting in regards to questions about a real estate purchase.