Wilkinson school board property tax bill picture comes into focus

The Wilkinson County School Board last week voted to approve its new millage rate, thus paving the way for property tax bills to be mailed out.

Tax Commissioner Amanda Panther told the Times Journal Post on Tuesday that the Georgia Department of Revenue is expected to give the county the go-ahead “hopefully by the end of today.”

That would put the timetable at “by late next week,” in terms of tax bills being sent out, according to Panther. 

“I expect that first week in March to be really busy. A lot of people are calling our office and champing at the bit to go ahead and pay,” she said. “So, it shouldn’t take long (for local government coffers to begin refilling).”

The school board vote was a 3-2 decision.

A video of the meeting already had been viewed more than 5,000 times as of earlier this week on the Facebook page of David Hadarits, who is the school board’s new chairman. Hadarits implied political partisanship in his Facebook post, listing the party of each school board member and their vote. Both Democrats on the board – Kimberly Shinholster-Watkins and Charles Pitts — voted yes, as did Republican Leigh Scott, first elected in 2022. Voting no, meanwhile, were the two brand-new Republicans — Hadarits and District 3’s Johanna Rogers.

The school board recently voted in a millage rate of 18.75, a decrease of .931 mills from its most recent millage rate of 19.681. However, due to an increase in the overall property digest, the new millage rate does not qualify as the “recommended rollback rate,” which is what Hadarits and Rogers were at least aiming for.

“The…tax increase for a home with a fair market value of $125,000 is approximately $78.55 per year and the proposed increase for non-homestead property with a fair market value of $100,000 is approximately $62.84 per year,” according to a Board of Education release.

At a recent public meeting, Superintendent Angela James was candid when telling the audience that the plan certainly was not to “horde a pile of money so we can blow it on furniture, or blow it on whatever.” 

“To take the abuse that we’ve taken (in comments on Facebook) is not right, and it’s hurtful, because I’ve lived and worked in this community my whole life,” she said. “I love this community, and my heart is this community.”

Instead, James and the WCSD’s finance team spent the first half of the meeting going over specific aspects of the budget.

“Core economic inflation places significant pressure on the district,” said James, then rattling off examples such as “transportation, maintenance, utility costs and employee health benefits and insurance.”

There’s also the issue of unfunded mandates from the state, including computer science initiatives, counseling services and safety upgrades, according to the superintendent.

The WCSD also is anticipating a decrease in funding from the government for the 2026 fiscal year, due to the fact that the district’s enrollment continues to shrink. Overall student enrollment has been cut almost in half during the last three decades. In October 1994, for example, the Georgia Department of Education’s FTE “headcount” for the WCSD was 1,993 students. Fast forward to October 2024, and that number was 1,036 students. Back in the 1990s, there were always closer to 450-500 students at Wilkinson County Middle School. Now, it’s less than 250.

Going back several decades, school board meetings in Wilkinson County drew very little interest from the public and weren’t really on the radar. That all changed when Hadarits last year began recording the videos and scrutinizing the board on Facebook. Other community members then joined the chorus on Facebook, and the school board is no longer operating under the radar, to say the least.

The WCSD last month received its annual report card from the state, which covered the 2023-2024 school year, which pre-dated James’ tenure as superintendent. The report card came in the form of a College and Career Ready Performance Index (CCRPI) score.

Standardized testing results are at the CCRPI’s core. In terms of those testing results, otherwise known as Content Mastery, the Wilkinson County School District finished in the third percentile (174th out of 180) at the Elementary School level, the 11th percentile (160th out of 180) at the Middle School level, as well as the sixth percentile (170th out of 180) at the high school level, in terms of Georgia’s 180 “county” and “city” school districts.

In terms of Wilkinson County High School, 18.6 percent of students passed the United States History test, which ranked 164th out of 180 school districts. WCHS came in at 18.3 percent “proficient or above” in Biology, good for 164th out of 180 school districts. In terms of the reading test,  a combination of multiple-choice questions and short-answer questions that focus on vocabulary and the ability to interpret text passages, a total of 47.1 WCHS students who took the test were “reading at grade level or above,” which was 150th out of 180 districts in
Georgia.