If you haven’t been following along – and how could you not be? – school safety is rightfully the topic of the day YEAR right now, and that is no different in Montgomery County. In fact, it was on the Board of Supervisors most recent agenda this past Monday night, where BOS members listened to Sheriff Hank Partin discuss the need to add to their School Resource Officer force. Yann Ranaivo, a Roanoke Times reporter and fantastic follow on Twitter, was there and detailed the discussion, embedded in abbreviated form below. Everything takes money, of course, and the discussion revolved in part around how to fund these new positions. As a result of that discussion, the BOS voted to propose (highlighted to point out that it’s not a guaranteed increase!) of $1.5 cents per $100 assessed value on real estate in Montgomery County. The current rate for the County is $.89 cents per $100; this proposal would bump that to $90.5 cents per $100.

It’s hard to imagine, in today’s world, that we wouldn’t want to have the funds in place to ensure our schools are properly secured. For context, according to the 2017 Nest Realty Nest Report, the median sales price for a home in the County was ~ $214,500. At a rate of $.89/$100 of assessed value, that property owner is paying $1909.05 in real estate property taxes. Under the new proposal, if that rate had been $.905/$100 of assessed value, the total tax liability would rise $32.17 to $1941.22. As Montgomery County Public Schools superintendent Mark Miear posted on Twitter, “Would you be willing to pay this amount to add SRO’s to elementary schools?”

You can read a Storify of Yann’s tweets below, or his article here. So … good idea, or bad one?