VATRE stands for Voter Approved Tax Rate Election.Right now, Texas statute sets a limit on the tax rate a school district can approve without an election. Many districts, including Perryton ISD, have been at that limit. If we raise the Maintenance and Operations tax rate by $0.03 as we have proposed, it requires us to have the approval of the voters who live in the district. Thus, we have to have a Voter Approved Tax Rate Election, or VATRE.

November 5^th, the same day as the election for the President.

There are two types of tax rates that school districts set. The first is the the Interes and Sinking (I&S) rate that is used for paying off bonds. The second is the Maintenance and Operations (M&O) rate the is used for salaries, equipment, and supplies. Since PISD did not sell the entirety of the bond money and is waiting to sell 15 million of our bonds from last year, we do not have to request the full amount of tax for I&S in 2024-2025. Our proposal would take three pennies of I&S tax and move it to the M&O tax. By doing that, the school would have more money to pay teachers and buy equipment, but the total tax rate would not go up. In other words, we would be taking money from one bucket and putting it in another, but the size of the buckets (the tax rate) would not change. 

Our plan is to allot the entire additional revenue to a riase for teachers and staff and possible purchases of buses. Perryton ISD’s salary schedule is behind most districts in comparable size. 

No.

No. As a property owner over 65, the tax rate on your homestead does not change and the VATRE will have no effect. Additionally, if the VATRE passed, it would not change the total tax rate and the tax rate would stay the same for all tax payers. 

A “golden penny” is a penny of tax that is supplemented by the state at the rate of about 2 pennies of state funding for every 1 penny of tax.

Yes. In Perryton’s case, each penny raises about $100,000 locally, but the state will give us $200,00 in extra funding for it. So the 3 pennies that the VATRE is asking for will provide a little over $300,000 in extra dollars from the community, but the state will give us over $600,000 in extra funding. Added together that gives the schoools about 1 million more dollars for salaries and equipment. 

Yes. These are referred to as “cooper pennies” and the district would not be asking for these type of pennies because the state would not give us additional funding for them. Each one of those pennies would bring in about $100,000 of extra funding. 

Actually, Perryton ISD is exempt from doing an efficiency audit this year because we are still under a disaster declaration stemming from our June 2023 tornado. Efficiency audits are expensive, costing $10,000 to $30,000 or more. We will not have to complete the efficiency audit before the VATRE, if it is put on the ballot this year. If the district were to wait until next year to ask for the VATRE, we would have to spend the extra money in order to have the audit completed.