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“Our Board of Education works extremely hard at balancing the need to provide a quality education for our children with their desire to be as financially responsible as possible.

During the past several years the Loup City Board and Administration has lowered the district’s spending by almost $700,000 over two years.  

SPENDING

In Fiscal Year 2014-2015 Loup City Public Schools spent $4,706,166.  During the past fiscal year (2019-2020) the district spent $4,893,970.71 or an annual increase of less than 1%.  Also, district spending was the lowest it has been in the past four years.  The past three years the district has spent over $5 million annually.  

TAXES

During Fiscal year 2014-2015 The General Fund tax asking was $4,385,823.  The 20-21 fiscal year tax request has been set at $4,646,465, an increase of 5.9% or less than 1% annually.

STATE AID

State aid has dropped from a high of $1.2 million in 2002-2003 to $27,000 for next year.   During fiscal year 2009-2010 the district was still receiving $779,000 in state aid, which computes to a loss of 7.5 Million over ten years.

In a further effort to help our taxpayers, we have kept our levy artificially low by spending down cash reserves.  The district is now at a point where we must move our tax asking back to the level it would have been at if the cash reserves had not been used to offset some of the tax burden.  

The hope was that our state legislators might put in place a means to provide some meaningful property tax relief before we reached this point.  Unfortunately, this has not materialized.  Recognizing that the majority of the people in our district want us to maintain a quality school we have no choice except to raise property taxes to fund our needs.  

Even when facing this challenge we are working to do this in the most fiscally practical way possible.  Our tax asking increase is only a very modest 2% for the 2020-21 budget year.    

The board and I are working through a long range planning process to address future needs and consider ways that additional cuts can be made.  With the support of our public we plan to continue to provide a great education for the children of our district.”