Del Val’s fire alarms have been around since 2006, and the parts required to keep fixing the system are no longer available. The Board of Education wants to pass a referendum on the midterm elections on Nov. 3.
“A referendum is just the question,” Superintendent Scott McKinney said. “It’s a ballot question that goes to the community members and allows them to ask that permission to raise funds.”
The fire alarm system is constantly being fixed on, building and grounds supervisor Arnold Stang explained that the school has been having someone from Johnson Control has been coming to the school about once a week. It costs the school a base of $850 and then by the hour to fix the system or any part that’s down.
“[An] issue that comes with the fire alarm system is that if any part of it goes down, we need to put someone on fire watch,” Board of Education president Frank Simini said. “That means sit a human in a chair wherever the alarms are down and they literally just sit there to look for a fire. They are the fire alarm so they can call 911, that’s extremely expensive because that’s a 24-hour coverage thing.”
If the referendum is passed, then Del Val can get $314,840 in state aid that comes from Debt Service Aid. Debt service aid is financial assistance provided to school districts or municipalities to cover payments on bonds or capital improvement loans. If it’s not passed, Del Val will not receive any state aid and the school would pay $926,000 from the capital reserve account.
“A capital reserve account is basically a special savings account that the school district is allowed to have specifically for capital improvements,” business administrator Teresa O’Brien said. “There are two ways to generate money into the capital reserve account; one of the ways is to directly, through the tax levy and the second way [is] we look at any excess revenues or balances in the expenditure accounts that haven’t been spent.”
On the ballot, a voter will see that Del Val can receive 40% but the board believes the school will receive 34% because of the Annual Appropriation Act. No school will get 100% of funding, and for the last 12 years, the state has been giving 85% of funding. The board took the 40% and multiplied it with the 85%, that’s where the 34% came from.
More questions can be found on the referendum page on the school website or the community can attend a public information session on October 5th.
