Yes, part of your tax bill reflects increased funding to District 153 schools, but it’s not the primary reason bills skyrocketed, said Superintendent Scott McAlister. The major culprit was the Cook County triannual reassessment of south suburban properties.
School District 153 serves about 1,900 students in Willow, Churchill and James Hart Schools.
In November 2022, more than 70% of taxpayers agreed to raise the district’s educational rate that had been stagnant for 30 years. Without an increase for such a long period, the district couldn’t pay its bills without borrowing funds to cover more than $2 million of debt.
To pull the district out of debt and provide for it academic needs and physical plant, the referendum gave the district a new educational rate. It jumped from $4.40 to $5.61 per $100 assessed value of property. That increase is reflected on tax bills due Aug. 1.
Homeowners had sticker shock when they got their tax bills this month. They will have a chance to ask for clarification on that increase when Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi comes to Homewood Saturday, July 20, for a question and answer session starting at 9:30 a.m. at the Homewood Auditorium, 2010 Chestnut Road.
“There’s an understood perception that tax bills in this community went up as a result of the referendum,” McAlister said at the Monday, July 15, school board meeting. “There’s no doubt that as we went through the referendum process that we told people this would raise your taxes and stated how much. That has come to fruition in the recent round of tax bills.
“But there’s another thing that was concurrent with that, and that was the triannual reassessment,” the superintendent said. He said news reports tell of attempts to reduce the homeowners’ burden and shifted the increase to businesses, but the Cook County Board of Review reversed that approach.
“So what ended up happening was the local share of your property tax bill that was about 67% (and) has climbed to over 70% and the business share went down a little bit,” McAlister said.
“I’m not going to tell you the referendum did not cause your tax bills to go up. It obviously did. However, the much bigger increase was simply due to that reassessment.”
He urged homeowners to attend the meeting Saturday to learn more about the triannual reassessment process.
