As the county budget process gets into full swing, the single largest component of the budget is the school system. The board of education currently absorbs more than 52% or $36,200,000.00 of the county's budget. That means that more than fifty cents of every tax dollar you pay to the county goes to education.

We've already heard the BOE is planning to ask for anywhere from a million to more than two million dollars more for their operations budget. The only possible way that can happen is a large property tax increase.

One point the BOE has made is that they haven't asked for an increase in funding in several years. But there may be a good reason for that. Back in 2010, while I served on the board, the BOE voted to stop allowing out of county students to attend Loudon County schools. We had discovered there were hundreds of the OOC students in the system. Under the new regulations, the county school enrollment began to go down. Over the following years, the enrollment consistently fell which might make you think the cost of operating the school would also go down and for a couple of years it did. In fact, while I was on the board our expenditures went down every year, but for the last two years with the enrollment still falling, expenditures have risen.

So, over the last two years with enrollment near it's lowest, spending has increased nearly two and a half million dollars.

Kind of a head scratcher. We'll look a little deeper at the numbers and see what else we can figure out.

All the numbers above are from the BOE and state audit.