KOOTENAI COUNTY, Idaho — Families in the Lakeland Joint School District in Rathdrum might soon need to pay to keep their children in sports.
In May, the district hopes to pass a $7.5 million levy. About $2 million of the levy would be dedicated to funding sports and extracurricular activities.
If they levy doesn’t pass, the district said it would have to charge students roughly $1,800 per year to participate in sport.
“We came up with this number based off last year’s information. Going forward with this year, we don’t want that number to actually hit our students, but we know that’s a number that we do have to hit if we want to keep everything exactly the same,” said District Accounting Specialist Chelsea Pursley.
It also said it would have to raise the cost of just about everything related to athletics, including the price to attend games and other athletic events.
The proposed levy is $2 million less than the levy that failed in November, meaning if it passes, voters will see their property taxes decrease.
“We heard the feedback that they really wanted more transparency in what we were putting out there, so we spent a lot of time putting together our recommendation to take to the board and rerun the levy. We did decrease the dollar amount,” CFO, Jessica Grantham said.
The remainder of the levy not allocated to sports and extracurriculars will help maintain a variety of programs and fund dozens of staff positions across the district.
“Lakeland really prides itself on small community schools. The state doesn’t fund in that mechanism. We have pretty small classroom sizes, so in order to do that, we need more funding than what the state provides for what we’re doing,” said Grantham and Pursley.
The district said if the levy fails and it moves to a ‘pay-to-play’ model, it plans to fundraise to help make sports affordable for all students.
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