Numbers Cannot Lie, But People Can!

On this past Saturday, I received two note cards in the mail about the Proposition 1 tax increase for the Ladue School District. The first was from the district itself and spelled out the same old facts I had already heard. The second piece was much more interesting, a flyer from Takebackladueschools.com that spelled out exactly how much my tax would increase for next year and then tried to convince me to vote NO for the proposition. I flipped over the card to read the arguments, and was surprised to see some which seemed to contradict the well known facts given the on the district proposition site.


The first claim was pretty surprising -- declining enrollment. I knew as a fact the middle school had the largest enrollment in years while my son was just there, so I thought I would check the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education site which should know the facts. They had a nice synopsis of every school district in the state, including one for Ladue. I have included a screen capture from the site as my first picture for this posting. In 2007 the district enrollment was 3522, then 3580, 3701, 3799 and then 3939 for 2011. That sure does not look like declining enrollment to me! That looks more like an 11.8% increase over 4 years. On the TakeBack website it claims that this year "enrollment actually declined unexpectantly". I am curious what this new enrollment number is and why the site did not give any sources. Somehow I doubt enrollment has gone down by the 400 more students than we had in 2007, but if it has, I sure wish the site would give a source. I would be willing to believe the site more if it would tell me where they found their numbers, since if I look at the official numbers from the DESE increasing enrollment sure looks like a problem to me.


I will skip the second argument and go to the third which is "failure to respond to the economic downturn." That one also seemed strange since I distinctly remember the student outrage last year when a bunch of teachers were let go and told so in the middle of the school day. Although that was definitely not the way to terminate employees, it does demonstrate that just last year the district cut the budget by over $5 million to try to respond to the economic downturn. I also saw another article with an interesting graph in the news recently on StLToday. It shows all the county districts and shows how much their operating revenue per student has increased in the past 4 school years. Ladue is one of the ones near the bottom with a 1.55% increase over 4 years. It is hard to argue that the district is undergoing "financial mismanagement" and "compulsive spending of our money" when it is hardly increasing its per student expenditures at all, especially when other districts have increased theirs substantially.

Another interesting number I saw them spin on the TakeBack website was the $850K median home value for the city of Ladue, and then comparing that to the $150K "state average". They want to argue that even though our tax rate was significantly lower than the state average, since our valuation was so much higher we are still paying a lot more taxes per household. Whereas their argument sounds valid, the numbers are not, since the median home value across the whole district is much lower than $850K and we should really compare it more to similar suburban county districts (Clayton, Brentwood, Rockwood, etc) where the median home values are also much higher than the state average. Here is an article which gives real numbers, whereas, yet again the TakeBack site gives no sources for its information. So here we can see that, yes, the median value in the Ladue district ($408K) may be substantially higher than in Parkway for example ($223.5K), but it is not 5 times as much as implied by their numbers ($850K vs $150K). I sure wish the site had given some real numbers instead of pulling numbers out of a hat. It makes the entire site seem unbelievable when it keeps just claiming things without any facts or sources. In fact I found the ACTUAL median value for the city of Ladue from the U. S. Census Bureau and it is $773K not the $850K claimed. It took me 15 seconds to find the real number. Why can they not do this? Incidentally the median value for the state of Missouri is $137.7K which is even lower than the site stated and actually helps their weak argument here.

The simple knowledge that so many facts on this site are incorrect and gives no sources to back them up, makes their entire argument to vote NO very weak. I personally do not want to pay higher property taxes, but looking at the known facts and numbers from just about everywhere else, I cannot see how this TakeBack site can be believed at all. I would rather pay a few hundred dollars more per year to make sure our top school district remains among the top districts in the state, than to believe the unsupported claims on the TakeBack site and jeopardize the quality of our schools.