COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho — As Election Day is looming, Idaho school districts are urging their voters to vote "yes" on their levies.
KREM 2 spoke to both superintendents from the Coeur d'Alene School District and the Lakeland Joint School District to get all the details they want their voters to know.
The Lakeland Joint School District’s Superintendent Lisa Arnold wants voters to know the breakdown. The Lakeland Joint School District levy is $9.5 million.
"The state's going to pay for the first $2.37 million of the $9.52 million… we together will only be responsible for $7.4 million,” Arnold said.
What is not listed in the formal language of the levy is that some of the tax will be taken care of by the state.
For both Lakeland Joint and Coeur d’Alene school districts, the programs levies funds are teachers and support staff salaries, athletics, extracurricular activities, health services, operating expenses and safety.
The Coeur d'Alene School District's replacement levy is $25 million.
“We receive no dollars for school nurses, school resources officers, any of that campus safety kind of focus, and we know that is important to our schools and to our community,” Shon Hocker, Coeur d'Alene School District Superintendent said.
Without the funding, school administrators say the schools may face a harsh reality.
“If by chance we don’t have the levy, we are going to face $25 million worth of cuts,” Hocker said.
With those potential cuts, classroom sizes would get bigger, if districts are forced to let people go.
For both Superintendent Arnold and Hocker, they want to see their students accomplish many things past graduation, which is why in-school programs are so important to them.
For both school districts the levies take up 25% of their overall budget, which is why they are urging voters to vote yes.