AMHERST — Even if property taxes were paid on the tax-exempt housing where most school-age children of University of Massachusetts graduate students live, this revenue wouldn’t come close to covering the per-pupil costs for their education, according to a report completed by the UMass Donahue Institute.
But the report, presented to the Select Board and Amherst School Committee at a joint meeting Monday, also shows that the taxes paid from an average residential property in Amherst is only sufficient for paying about half the cost of educating one child.
Rod Motamedi, the project leader for the Donahue Institute, said that statistics show that between 2006 and 2016, $6,065 in taxes were generated per residential property in Amherst, with the portion of town’s expenditures on education per child averaging $12,193 during that same time frame.
“This report finds that the typical homeowner does not contribute nearly enough in property taxes to cover the cost of educating one student,” Motamedi wrote in the report.
The Donahue Institute’s work was a requirement of the Strategic Partnership signed in December 2015 by then Interim Town Manager David Ziomek and UMass Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy.
The Strategic Partnership, which runs until June 30, 2019, compels UMass to pay $120,000 annually related to services “including educating K-12 students who live in tax-exempt housing and first responder services” and called on the town and UMass “to jointly study the impact of K-12 students living in tax-exempt housing on the local schools.”
Town Manager Paul Bockelman said the report will be used in discussions with Subbaswamy prior to any renewal of the partnership.
“This serves as a basis for additional conversations with the university about its responsibilities to sustain the elementary and regional schools for the benefit of faculty and staff and the children who live in their housing,” Bockelman said.
Last school year, 52 schoolchildren were living in nonprofit housing associated with UMass, with the vast majority at North Village Apartments. If those 190 units were taxable, Motamedi said at an estimated $1,237 in taxes per unit based on the rents the university charges, the town would collect just $234,971 in taxes, well short of the more than $1 million it costs the town to educate the schoolchildren.
Of those 52 children, 38 percent are English Language Learners, above the 17 percent rate for the Amherst district, and 75 percent are eligible for free and reduced lunch, compared to 35 percent of students townwide.
Select Board member Connie Kruger said what’s missing from the report is that the property taxes on residential homes generate taxes before, during and after a child is going through the schools. This “life cycle” idea of property taxes underwrites education even when children are not present at those homes.
Because this is absent from the Donahue Institute’s analysis, Kruger said the report seemed sanitized to favor a particular viewpoint, even Amherst bearing responsibility for educating children living in tax-exempt university housing has remained a sore point for a while.
“I’m disappointed because we waited about two years to get this study, and a lot of this could have been done with assessor and school data,” Kruger said, adding that the report also doesn’t acknowledge that education is a recruitment factor for UMass faculty.
Motamedi said that the Donahue Institute is a nonprofit consulting company under the umbrella of UMass and that his role was just to provide information, and not to make any recommendations with the data.
Part of the impetus for the study was the closing of Mark’s Meadow School in 2010. A university-owned property, Mark’s Meadow had been one of the four town elementary schools, and was used rent-free by the town.
The report also shows that part of the challenge for Amherst’s school budgets is that per-pupil spending is high. For Amherst-Pelham schools, the per-pupil spending is $20,941, below Watertown’s $21,161, but above Dedham’s $19,123, and well above Northampton’s $14,564.
“Amherst-Pelham is on the upper end of per-pupil spending among the 10 most comparable districts,” the report notes.
The report lays out possible scenarios for how the town and university could look at fair compensation for those children in tax-exempt housing being educated, from the low of $1,237 cost per pupil if North Village paid property taxes, to a high of $14,986, the average cost per pupil when English Language Learner instruction is factored in.
Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.
