CHINA SPRING, Texas (KWTX) - This November several school districts across Central Texas will have school bonds on the ballot. But at China Spring ISD they’ll have what’s called a Voter-Approval Tax Rate Election.

“A VATRE is an election that is triggered after a school board approves a maintenance and operations tax that is higher than the state’s maximum rate that it can set,” said China Spring ISD Superintendent Marc Faulkner.

He says that this year their school board set it 6¢ higher than the maximum rate to make up for changes in state funding formulas.

“The state has been decompressing the tax rate on the maintenance and operation side and so we’re going down from $1.01 down to about $0.92,” he explained.

A 9¢ decrease that would mean losing thousands of dollars in funding, Faulk

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