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Student
count drops &
school tax climbs
By
Carol Main
of
the Desert Journal
Student
enrollment in the Truth or Consequences Municipal Schools District has
dropped steadily the last five years.
According
to school administration records, past and present enrollments are:
1997-98
– 2,092 students;
1998-99
– 2,104 students;
1999-2000
– 1,787 students;
2000-01
– 1,708 students;
2001-02
– 1,625 students.
The
drop of 479 students since the 1998-99 school year shows a 22.8% decrease
in enrollment from then through the present school year.
However,
Sierra County Treasury records show that there was a school tax increase
of 18.25% levied against property owners just last year alone.
These
figures do not include students who are being home schooled or enrolled in
private institutions, only those that property owners are paying to
educate.
People
say free schooling in America went out with the horse and buggy. Although
our schools are computerized, Sierra County relies heavily on ranching and
farming, and retains the horse and buggy idea of "value received for
dollars paid."
Declining
student enrollment is one of many indicators of a troubled economy.
Another
indicator is the fact that the number of people who filed applications for
indigent status with Sierra County Indigent Administrator Sandra Whitehead
more than doubled last year.
Sixty-nine
people applied for indigent status during 2000 and in 2001 claims were
filed by 143 people for an increase of 207.2% in merely a year.
Whitehead
is also the Sierra County Assessor and she said that the number of
properties sold over the past five years does not vary widely. In 1997
there were 598 completed sales in Sierra County, in 1998 there were 689,
in 1999 there were 699 and in 2000 there were just 574.
"I
cannot give you," Whitehead said, "the total for 2001 because we
are still compiling that data."
This
indicates the empty commercial buildings that were listed in the Desert
Journal on Jan. 4 are not abandoned, they are just not occupied.
One
former landlord (who will not be named to protect him from society's
predators) said when asked why he sold his three rental properties last
year, "Because of the high overhead. Everything keeps going up, from
property taxes to utility rates.”
"Everything,
that is," he said, "except the rents that I could charge. To
keep tenants I had to keep the rents low because working people in this
town only get minimum wage, and most renters today have no respect for the
house they are renting. They just destroy everything.”
"If
I got tenants through the HUD program I got even a lower class of renter
on welfare. And HUD no longer stands up for the property owner. I only
wanted to sell one house but the buyer wanted everything so I said why
not, and just got out of it because I am getting too old for the
hassle."
One
of his former tenants, a single working mother of two teenage boys,
reluctantly moved out when he sold her home so the new owner could repair
the bathroom.
Normally,
another trouble indicator might be in the number of shut offs of city
owned utilities. But that is not true in T or C because of the fluctuation
of winter visitors and the fact that many residents like the
above-mentioned tenant move around inside the city.
During
2000 the city turned off all utility services to 1,057 homes and in 2001
the number of service shutoffs was 1,004.
Utility
department employee Britt Maxwell said, "Our service shutoffs don't
really mean that all of these people left the area.”
“So
many people have homes here that they only use for three or four months
each year that we have no way of tracking whether or not a shutoff request
means people are moving away or if they are just going to be gone for a
few months,” he said.
"And
then a lot of other people," Maxwell said, "move all over within
the city without ever leaving here, and with each one of those moves we
record a service shutoff."
Records
from some agencies, such as the Department of Health & Human Services
(for a welfare roll count) and PNM Gas & Electric (on their good
neighbor program), were not available at press time.
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