Two schools, one a vocational technical high school and the other an elementary school, sit on tracts of land a few blocks from the house in which I grew up, in Ford City (Armstrong County), Pennsylvania.* The communities served by them are, for the most part, not particularly prosperous. Household incomes, wages, home prices, rents, and levels of education are below the state average; while poverty, unemployment, and air pollution are above it.
Many property owners in the area are elderly women, living on small pensions and social security. Their property taxes finance the schools, and as these rise, the tax burden can be considerable. This encumbrance is made subjectively worse by the fact that these older taxpayers no longer have children in school.
For the local school board, rising costs—including those for the ever growing number of administrators—and a limited and potentially rebellious tax base have created a budget crisis. The current budget shows a deficit of five million dollars. However, the board has come up with an ingenious way to deal with its revenue shortfall.