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Not to be outdone, Laclede County officials have also decided to put a surtax reduction before voters. While the Laclede County rate is not as high as the Clay County rate, it is nonetheless very high and by far the highest among neighboring counties. Laclede County’s rate cut is also larger than Clay County’s. Laclede County officials are proposing to reduce the surtax from $1.03 per $100 of assessed valuation to $0.51. The key thing to remember is that the surtax does not roll back as assessed valuations increase, so over time as the local economy grows—and this tax cut should help it grow more—the rate remains the same and the tax revenue generated by it will increase. For the record, the $0.51 rate is right on average for Missouri counties. (Some are saying that the average rate is $1.02, but whoever calculated that clearly used a weighted average. The largest counties of St. Louis, Jackson, and Clay with their very high rates significantly alter the calculation. I think the unweighted average (mean: $0.53; median: $0.41) is preferable for comparing individual counties to each other, especially counties such as Laclede, which is economically competing more with Camden and Dallas counties than with St. Louis and Kansas City.)

The Lebanon R-3 school district is crying some wolf about the size of this rate cut. School officials claim the district will lose $275,000 per year from this; however, Lebanon R-3 is a large school district, and that figure is less than one percent of its total revenues. This is a district that received $4 million in federal stimulus funds alone last year and which is poised, like every Missouri taxing district, to soon see a significant increase in personal property tax revenues this year from the dramatic increase in used car values. The personal property tax windfall alone should make up for the potential loss of revenue from the surtax reduction, should the voters pass it.

This commercial property surtax cut should be a real benefit to economic growth and job growth in Laclede County, and it will be interesting to see what the voters decide.

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Overall, the responses we’ve received so far in 2022 look generally like what we saw in 2021. Most schools either have not responded to our request for information or have denied teaching CRT. Some schools have opted to try and charge the Institute hundreds of thousands of dollars to get access to school curriculum, and many more wanted to charge smaller fees. What has been rare, however, is schools openly providing documents that include CRT-type material. Last year, the most prominent example of this was the Kansas City Public School District.

But another notable example from last year was the Hazelwood School District. Hazelwood was one district that provided CRT-related materials when the Institute sent requests last year, and at that time its curriculum included excerpts of the 1619 project being taught to fourth graders and materials provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center about “Teaching for Tolerance.” When Hazelwood responded to this year’s request, the district sent basically the same documents it did last year, though this time without any fourth-grade curriculum, indicating that content was removed from the curricula.

Our director of government accountability, Patrick Ishmael, has been critical of CRT concepts. But it’s important to remember that regardless of the content of the instruction, the public has a right to see it and districts have an obligation to provide it.

Hazelwood should be commended for its honesty and forthrightness in response to our inquiries, both last year and this year. Through two iterations of the project, it is the only district that to date has twice released the pertinent curriculum without any fees, delays, or complaints.

The point here is that if school districts are going to spend taxpayer money to educate students regarding a subject, including CRT, they should make the information available to parents. Ideally, all districts would be transparent with curriculum and would post it on their website or send it to parents before the start of a school year. After all, sunlight is the best disinfectant, and if government transparency can improve curricula, our schools and our kids will be better off for it.

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Patrick Ishmael joined The Heidi Glaus Show with Josh Gilbert on The BIG 550 KTRS to discuss the Kansas City Chiefs looking to perhaps move out of the state of Missouri and into Kansas, how would this affect the state of Missouri financially, and much more.

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