The Wichita School Board is asking for the ability to raise your property taxes — if they need too.
School officials say they don’t plan to raise taxes right now, but they want the option to do it in the future. The local option budget gives the district the option of raising taxes if the state decides to give school less money.
“There’s just a lot of uncertainty related to the budget still occurring in Topeka so we wanted to be sure that we were covering all our bases,” says Susan Willis, the chief financial officer for Wichita Public Schools. “It’s a little bit like getting preapproved for a loan. That should we need it will have it, but hopefully, we won’t need to go there.” Currently, the mill levy in Wichita is set at 30 percent which brings in $115 million. Wichita schools are asking the state to raise that to 33 percent which means $11 million more for the district.
(Read more: KWCH News)