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Tally tax levy proposes

Paige Sims

With the goal of improving the quality of the education environment provided for students in the Talawanda School District, the November 2007 ballot will include a tax levy for a potential complex to unite the high school and middle school.

The tax levy will call for an annual income tax of .25 percent and a property tax of $4.8 million over the next 28 years, to help fund new construction, additions, renovations and improvements to school facilities, acquisitions and providing for new equipment, and furnishings of educational buildings.

According to Holli Morrish, Talawanda School Board coordinator of development and community relations, this plan would improve the quality of the educational curriculum in the Talawanda School District.

Morrish said that among the variety of ideas behind the implementation of this plan is the idea of a shared middle school and high school complex.

"A shared complex is something that the school board has been looking into," Morrish said. "It would be a huge leap in the improvement of our curriculum, in that it would allow for more efficiency through shared resources and will improve the educational environment, by modernizing technology resources and science labs."

According to Morrish, a shared high school and middle school complex would not only help those at the middle and high school levels, but also help improve the quality of the schooling for the students at the elementary level.

For many years now Kramer Elementary has been deemed by the school board in need of renovation in order to keep up with the Ohio curriculum. In fact, several classes are presently utilizing mobile classrooms to house students and renovations are not feasible due to structural concerns. The next stage would be to close Kramer Elementary and either rebuild the building or move the school to a different facility.

A shared complex would open up the middle school, allowing for the possibility of moving those at the current Kramer Elementary to the current middle school facility.

In the past the inclusion of the levy on the election ballot has been met with mixed emotions. According to McGuffey Foundation School parent Michelle Patterson, the wide variety of incomes throughout the residents of Oxford lead to a large discrepancy between the families that are for the increase and those against it.

"I am for the tax increase," Patterson said. "We moved to Oxford from New Jersey's Princeton area just four years ago, so we are used to very high taxes. It seems to me that Princeton may be on the high end and Oxford on the low end, and I believe it is important to be paying somewhere in the middle."

As a method of responding to the questions that the community has been raising about personal costs of the plan, the board has created a calculator on the campaign Web site that allows residents to enter their personal information and calculate how much more they will be paying if the tax is indeed implemented, according to Morrish.

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"We are trying to do all we can to promote the positive aspects of this plan," Morrish said. "The bill hasn't been passed in recent years because people are so worried about the cost. However the renovations are inevitable and the cost of these renovations will just continue to increase. So Oxford as a community just needs to decide whether they want to pay today's dollars or tomorrow's dollars."