Delaware’s Equalization Committee has agreed to not make any decisions on whether to freeze or change the state’s equalization formula, which affects school funding, until next year. The purpose of the equalization formula is to allocate state resources to districts inversely based on their ability to raise revenues through their local property tax base. “It’s to try to help those …
The Delaware Department of Education announced last week it has hired a Virginia consultant to study the state’s public education funding system. As today’s wisecracker would say: Good luck with that. How the money trickles down to the classroom is complex, and it follows a funding system established in the 1940s. The state’s population then was 286,000, compared to today’s …
In November 2020, Vice Chancellor J. Travis Laster ordered all three counties in Delaware to reassess property by 2024 as part of a lawsuit settlement. In May, Laster ruled that the outdated assessments in the three counties violate a constitutional requirement that properties be taxed uniformly. New Castle County last assessed property in 1983, Kent in 1987 and Sussex in …
Following New Castle and Kent Counties, Sussex County agreed on April 13 to reassess the value of all real property, the first assessment that has been done in the county since 1974. The decision was in response to a Chancery Court decision that all three Delaware counties violated the law by assessing property far below the market value. The lawsuit …
