Vote NO on Sylvania Schools NEW $18MM+ Income Tax

5/5/26—8100 Voters (over 60%) said NO new taxes. The 18.3MM levy was very heavily defeated by more than a 20% margin with a very strong message to Admin.  Now you put a NEW 1%, permanent income tax on the November ballot, ignoring what the voters just told you, mandating a 1% pay cut to all working Sylvania residents.  If you get a typical 2%-3% pay increase, the schools just took ½ or 1/3 of it every year here forward.  $1,000 new ADDitional school tax for every $100,000 of income yearly.  Yet they still get nearly 50% of our property taxes (several thousand dollars per household) each year.

Realize this NEW 1% income tax will be paid by W-2 employees, 1099 contractors, subcontractors, tenants/renters, sole proprietors/partnerships, seniors w/side jobs-hobby income, 2nd/side jobs, part-time jobs, your kids’ jobs, etc. that live in Sylvania school district.

It’s sad that schools are seeing that they are getting paid so much $ in property tax that their attempts to get more have failed.  So instead of cutting their expenses, they decide to ask for a different kind of tax, income tax, to try to not have voters see how much total tax they are asking for.  It’s an attempt to confuse voters that are not as informed.

Admin recently put out a big reduce/cut list to shock people and try to get reaction votes without having them really understand the plan.  Why didn't they already go through all of their line items and reduce many of them to see if they could balance the budget without another big request?  They should have gone through a full reduction process a year+ ago in every area when they saw they were heading for a deficit.  They continue the same mentality as in the past years where they throw more money at a spending problem.  They fact is they don't want to reduce anything.  For example, if your family had too many expenses or lost some income, you would prioritize what was needed and start trimming what was discretionary until you balanced your budget.  Ballet lessons, tutoring, lattes, and other discretionary extras may need to go.

Admin and the Board needs to stop defaulting to the voters when they have a deficit.  The voters already pay nearly 50% of their property taxes to the schools which amounts to several thousand dollars per year for many households.  If they have had a change in funding, they need to revise their spending habits to live within their means by reducing their total expenses.  But they don’t want to reduce anything so they default to shock value by saying they will cut extracurriculars that affect many people, but are not very expensive.  They guilt enough voters into paying a lot more to make up for their refusal to make the appropriate reductions that the situation dictates.  We are back to inside-the-box, lazy thinking.  Get creative.  Think of new ways and moves to make.  Funding is changing so you need to change your habits and thinking.  Get lean like businesses do every day of the week.  The Board and Admin are doing the same thing they’ve always done even though the funding structure dictates a change. 

We suggest Admin starts thinking about partnering suggestions, like the TARTA idea at the September town hall.  Think outside of the norm to try to continue to reduce your expenses and get services done by others that get funding already.  When TARTA got the sales tax levy passed, we couldn’t believe it, realizing their buses have very few riders.  They got nearly 300% of their levy income with the new sales tax, so they should have extra $ now to help with bussing.

Another town hall suggestion was to get a fund set up for private donations to help pay for operations and not have the money go and sit in the Foundation’s accounts.  There are estate options like Wills, Trusts, Charitable Remainder Trusts, Donor Advised Funds, and similar mechanisms to give money to the school to make up for deficits.  Alumni, business owners, parents, grandparents, and others that support the school could private give funds to help make up for short falls.  The school could use some of the time and money spent on social media/marketing guilting voters into this new tax to instead attract additional funds from supporters.  Think about new, creative solutions rather than guilt.

People seem to be more concerned about extracurriculars (which is a fairly small overall cost), so Admin could reduce each of those a bit, but leave them intact as much as possible to satisfy the interests of lots of people.  The school digest they mailed shows 1 area went up 46% over the last 5 years and is extreme expensive now.  You would reduce more in areas like this that affect many fewer people and are more costly per student than others.  Every dollar you can shave gets you closer to your goal.  Do as much for as many people as you can with the money.

This request is almost an 18% increase in total income, which is far too much to ask for.  At the September town hall, we asked a board member that runs a small business with 20 employees what he would say to an employee that wants an 18% permanent pay increase starting 1/1?  Most small businesses are not going to grant that request.  We then asked what are you going to say if ALL of your employees want an 18% permanent pay increase starting 1/1?  It’s a rhetorical question b/c it’s an obvious answer.

It's a bit insulting to have the Board admit they are purposely carving out seniors that don’t have earned income from this 2nd new $18MM+ annual tax request, so that they can try to persuade these seniors to help vote in this huge new tax on the rest of the residents.  This would make those with earned income left to pay for all of the seniors' portions, plus all our own portions of the whole new tax, making those working pay even more than they asked for a few months ago.  Why not reduce the total by what the seniors would have paid and ask for less new $?  We hope seniors have some compassion for those of us working and once again vote NO to show the Board it’s not fair to the working class.

Have you ever wondered how much time and money is being spent on hundreds of signs all over the place, people to put those up, social media people, marketing people, many Facebook posts per day on several pages, interviews, podcasts, alumni messages, student messages, parent messages, teacher messages, videos, postcards, mailers, reports, digest, graphs, etc. to ignore the expense problem and throw a huge amount of more money at the problem?