Carrie Klauber is fed up with a public school district that takes advantage of its state-backed monopoly to provide a poor quality product at unreasonable expense while being unresponsive to the concerns of parents and other stakeholders.
So she’s trying a new form of tax resistance. “In addition to contacting the elected members of the school board,” she told the Boulder [Colorado] Daily Camera, “tax protest is an effective (and sometimes the only) way to force publicly funded groups to listen to and respond to concerned citizens.”
Every year the school district has a “count day” at which they take a census of how many students are in class throughout the district. They then use this count as the basis for their funding requests. The more students are enrolled, the more money the district can get from the various governments that provide school funding. Districts do a lot to try to increase attendance on “count days” for this reason (stunts like elephants, gift bags giveaways, ice cream socials, and carnival rides at school).
Klauber is keeping her children home that day. “As both a parent and taxpayer,” she says, “I can no longer passively sit back as I see our community underserved and overcharged, and, I must add, through no fault of the front-line personnel of teachers and paraprofessionals. If the management of [Boulder Valley School District] is forced to listen to the community and improve service, then we have helped all of us have a better school district.”
