Per-pupil spending and local tax effort vary enormously across Missouri, and property-poor is not the same as income-poor. These maps cover spending, tax effort, and the operating levy — and the “dime test” calculator below lets you compare any two districts. One caution before you start: the levy map shows the operating levy, which is not the whole school tax bill.
What this page shows
211 of 513 districts — 41%, teaching about 319,000 children — levy below the state’s $3.43 “performance levy.” But 194 of them already levy every cent their ceiling allows without a public vote. They are taxing at the legal maximum available to them, and it is still not enough.
The same tax rate buys wildly different schools. A 10¢ levy raises about $39 per student in Missouri’s property-poorest K–12 district and roughly $716 in its wealthiest — an 18-fold gap produced by local property wealth, not by effort.
174 districts carry no long-term debt at all — and 161 of them are rural. Debt-free is not prudence. Borrowing requires something to borrow against.
Data current as ofMO State Auditor property tax rates tax year 2025DESE school finance 2025Census F-33 school finance FY2024
PER-PUPIL SPENDING
What districts spend per student
Current per-pupil spending by district. Spending and outcomes track less tightly than many expect — local wealth and cost of living shape these figures as much as choices do.
Current per-pupil spending by district, 2025.
SPENDING CHANGE · PICK YOUR BASELINE
How per-pupil spending has moved
Choose a baseline year and the shading shows how each district’s per-pupil spending has changed from that year to now — a way to see where budgets have grown or been squeezed.
Use the Baseline Year control on the map to change the comparison year.
LOCAL TAX EFFORT
What communities tax themselves, per student
Local tax effort — the property-tax dollars a community raises per student — varies enormously across Missouri, and property-poor is not the same as income-poor.
Property-tax dollars raised per student by district, 2025-26.
WHO PAYS
Where each district’s money actually comes from
Every Missouri district is funded from three pockets: local property taxes, state aid, and federal dollars. But the mix is nothing like uniform. This map shows the share raised locally. Blue districts fund themselves; red districts depend on the state and federal government for most of what they spend.
Share of each district’s total revenue raised from local sources, 2025 (Missouri DESE finance data). The three shares — local, state, federal — sum to 100% for every district. Statewide, 58.6% of school revenue is raised locally; the median district raises 50.2% locally. Read Grandview R-II, Sturgeon R-V and Laquey R-V with care on this map: each hosts a statewide virtual school, so their local share is diluted by thousands of students who live — and pay tax — elsewhere. Their low local share is an artifact of that, not a measure of local wealth or effort.
The range runs from 13% to 97%. Brentwood (97%), Clayton (97%) and Ladue (95%) raise almost every dollar they spend from their own property tax base and take almost nothing from the state. At the other end sit districts that raise little locally because there is little to tax.
And this tracks wealth almost perfectly. Sort districts by property wealth per student and the local share climbs step by step: the poorest quarter of districts raises 40% locally, the wealthiest quarter raises 63%. The correlation between property wealth and local funding share is 0.71.
This is worth pausing on, because it cuts against a common assumption. A district that depends heavily on state aid is not necessarily a district that isn’t trying — it is usually a district that cannot raise much locally no matter how hard it tries. The next map shows exactly why.
THE DIME TEST
What a single dime actually buys
A “dime” is a 10¢ levy per $100 of assessed value — the same tax rate everywhere in Missouri. What it raises per student is not remotely the same anywhere. This map shades every district by what one dime brings in; red is below the statewide median of $130.88.
How to read it: each district is shaded by what a 10¢ tax raises per student. Red = raises less than the typical Missouri district ($130.88). Blue = raises more. The range runs from about $39 per student to about $716.
The same dime, 18 times over: a 10¢ levy raises about $39 per student in Missouri’s property-poorest K-12 district (Naylor R-II) and roughly $716 in its wealthiest (Clayton, with Brentwood a whisker behind at $713) — an 18-fold gap produced entirely by local property wealth, not by effort. Two communities can tax themselves at identical rates and fund their schools completely differently. Try it for any district below.
The true statewide extreme is wider still. Shell Knob 78 — a K-8 district on Table Rock Lake with 114 students and a shoreline full of high-value property — raises $961 per student from the same dime. That is 24 times what Naylor raises. We lead with Clayton because it is a like-for-like K-12 comparison; Shell Knob is the honest outer edge.
Assessed valuation per student = 2025 assessed valuation (Missouri State Auditor, 2025 Property Tax Rates) divided by average daily attendance. The median district holds $130,885 of assessed value per student. A 10¢ levy raises AV-per-student × 0.001 per pupil. Three districts that host statewide virtual schools are excluded — see the note below.
Three districts are deliberately left out of this map, and it is worth knowing why.Grandview R-II (Jefferson Co.) hosts the Missouri Virtual Academy; Sturgeon R-V and Laquey R-V host similar statewide online programs. Their enrollment counts include thousands of children who live all over Missouri and pay property tax somewhere else entirely. Grandview’s roll went from 706 students in 2019 to 4,484 in 2025 without a single new house being built inside the district.
Any per-student figure for those three — assessed value per student, spending per student, local revenue share, even the achievement score — divides a small local quantity by a large statewide one, and the result is an artifact, not a fact about that community. We exclude them from the dime test rather than publish a number we know to be meaningless.
WHAT THE TAX BASE IS MADE OF
The dime test says how much property. This says what kind.
When a Missouri district taxes property, it is not taxing one thing. It is taxing four, and they are taxed very differently. This is the first time this data has been published district by district — the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education provided it to us in July 2026 in response to a records request.
Start here if you have never thought about this before. Missouri sorts every taxable thing you own into four buckets, and taxes each at a different fraction of what it is worth:
Your house is taxed on 19% of its market value. A store, factory or office is taxed on 32% of its market value — the heaviest treatment of real estate. Your car, truck, boat, or a farmer’s combine is “personal property,” taxed on 33⅓% — heavier still. And farmland is taxed on 12% of its agricultural productive value: not what the field would sell for, but what the soil can grow, set by the state on a grade scale (RSMo 137.017).
That last one matters enormously and almost nobody outside school finance knows it. A quarter-section of good Missouri cropland might sell for $1.5 million and be carried on the tax rolls at a small fraction of that. The district that educates the farmer’s children never sees the market value of the land at all.
1.4%
of Missouri’s entire school tax base is farmland — $2.0B out of $143.0B
DESE / county clerks · tax year 2024
96
districts raise a third or more of their base from cars, trucks and equipment — 92 are rural
DESE / county clerks · tax year 2024
65.6%
of the suburban tax base is simply houses
DESE / county clerks · tax year 2024
How to read it: pick one of the four kinds of property in the selector. Each district is shaded by how much of its tax base comes from that kind. Darker = a bigger share. Hover any district and the tooltip gives you its whole mix at once.
Share of each district’s assessed valuation coming from residential, agricultural, commercial and personal property, tax year 2024. Colour is clamped at the 5th and 95th percentiles so the map stays readable; the tooltip always shows the district’s true numbers. Source: Missouri DESE School Finance, assessed valuation by county, district and property type (records request, 13 July 2026), built from county clerk certifications.
Four maps of Missouri, and they are not the same map
Switch the selector and the state reorganises itself each time. The median district in each kind of community is made of quite different stuff:
Median district’s tax base
Homes
Farmland
Businesses
Cars, trucks & equipment
City (14 districts)
52.8%
0.1%
25.0%
20.3%
Suburb (45)
65.7%
0.0%
15.6%
16.4%
Town (69)
50.5%
1.6%
20.0%
25.9%
Rural (388)
47.5%
8.2%
11.4%
29.8%
Median share for districts of each locale type, tax year 2024. Columns do not sum to 100% because each is a separate median.
The suburb runs on houses. The countryside runs on trucks.
A suburban district raises two-thirds of everything it has from residential property — a base that is stable, appreciating, and hard to move away. The typical rural district raises 30% of its base from personal property: pickups, combines, grain trucks, livestock trailers. Ninety-six districts — 92 of them rural — raise a third or more that way.
Personal property is the worst possible thing to build a school budget on. It is assessed at the highest rate in Missouri law (33⅓%), which makes it feel like a rich vein — and then it depreciates every single year, and it can be sold, traded, or simply driven across a county line. And it goes with being property-poor: the quarter of districts most dependent on personal property hold a median $113,008 of assessed value per student; the quarter least dependent on it hold $166,991.
What actually predicts a wealthy district is not houses and not farmland. It is commercial property — the correlation between a district’s business share and its assessed value per student is +0.33, the strongest of the four. Districts with somewhere to shop, work and warehouse are districts with something to tax.
We tested the obvious story about farmland, and it did not hold up. We are telling you anyway.
The intuition is clean: farmland is assessed on productive value, so farm districts should be property-poor. We checked. They are not. The correlation between a district’s farmland share and its assessed value per student is −0.10 — effectively nothing. Districts that get 10% or more of their base from farmland hold a median $121,800 per student; everyone else holds $122,350. That is the same number.
Why the story fails: farm districts have few students. A thin tax base divided by a small enrollment lands in the same place as a thicker base divided by a bigger one. Missouri’s property-poverty problem is real — the dime test above is an 18-fold gap — but farmland is not what causes it.
The honest farmland finding is the one in the numbers above: in a state with 27 million acres of farmland, agriculture is 1.4% of the school tax base. Not a small share — a vanishing one. That is what assessing land on what it grows, rather than what it is worth, does to a school district’s ledger.
What the data show
Statewide, Missouri’s $143.0B school tax base is 57.8% residential, 20.4% commercial, 20.4% personal property and 1.4% agricultural. The mix varies sharply by locale: the median suburban district is 65.7% homes; the median rural district is 29.8% personal property and 8.2% farmland. Business share is the only component that correlates meaningfully with property wealth per student (+0.33); farmland share does not (−0.10).
Our interpretation
Two districts can levy the same rate and be taxing entirely different economies. A suburb taxes appreciating houses; a rural district taxes depreciating machinery and land assessed on what it grows. That difference does not show up in a levy map, and it does not show up in a spending map — but it shapes how stable and how growable a district’s revenue is over a decade.
What this cannot establish
These are assessed values, not market values, and the two cannot be reconciled for farmland. Because Missouri assesses actively farmed land at 12% of agricultural productive value rather than 12% of sale price, dividing the agricultural figure by 0.12 does not recover what the land is worth. The gap between the market value of Missouri farmland and its taxable value is therefore larger than these figures can show, and we will not put a dollar amount on it — doing so would require a soil-grade model we do not have. This is one year of data (tax year 2024); we cannot yet show how the mix has shifted over time.
OPERATING TAX LEVY
The rate communities set
The operating tax levy is the property-tax rate a district sets to fund day-to-day operations — teachers, buses, heat, books. The revenue any given rate produces still depends on local property wealth (see the dime test above), which is why effort and result come apart in Missouri.
Important: this map is not your tax bill. The operating levy is only part of what a Missouri homeowner pays to their school district. Separate from it sits the debt-service levy, which repays bonds for buildings and cannot legally be spent on instruction. Add them together and you get the school line on your tax statement.
The gap is not small. 327 of Missouri’s 516 districts carry a debt-service levy on top of the operating rate shown here. Statewide the median operating levy is $3.60, but the median total school levy is $4.12. Webb City, for instance, levies $2.75 for operations plus 68¢ for debt service — $3.43 in total, which is what its residents actually pay. So if this map makes your district look like a low-tax district, check the total before you believe it — the district lookup shows both numbers side by side.
How to read it: each district is shaded by the operating levy it actually charges, in dollars per $100 of assessed value. Red = below the $3.43 statutory “performance levy.”Blue = at or above it.
The operating levy each district actually levied in 2025 — not its ceiling — in dollars per $100 of assessed value. Source: Missouri State Auditor, 2025 Property Tax Rates. Red = below the $3.43 statutory “performance levy.” Excludes debt service.
211 of Missouri’s 513 districts — 41%, teaching about 319,000 children — are in the red on this map. As of 1 July 2026, each must now notify the state that it is nonetheless providing an adequate education; and if it cannot say so, Missouri law declares the shortfall “deemed to be a result of insufficient local effort” (RSMo 163.021.6).
Here is the problem with that. Of those 211 districts, 194 — 92% — are already levying every cent their tax rate ceiling allows them without a public vote. For 209 of the 211, the ceiling itself sits below $3.43. Exactly two districts in the entire group could reach the standard by board action. Every other one would have to go to its voters. They are taxing at the legal maximum available to them, and it is still not enough to meet the state’s own number.
And the number itself is not a measure of effort. The correlation between a district’s operating levy and its property wealth per student is −0.00 — not weak, but nothing at all. Knowing what a Missouri community taxes itself tells you precisely nothing about whether it is rich or poor.
Hold the rate perfectly still and watch what happens. Sixty-four districts levy the identical operating rate of $2.75 — the same effort, to the cent. In Thayer R-II a dime of that rate raises $57 per student. In Pettis Co. R-XII the same dime raises $702. That is twelve times the money for exactly the same tax. Both are red on this map. Both must file notice. Both are presumed to have made insufficient local effort.
How often do Missouri voters actually raise a school levy?
The law’s implicit answer to a district below $3.43 is: go ask your voters. So we went and counted how often that has actually worked. The Missouri State Auditor flags every tax rate that changed by voter approval, district by district, year by year. We read seven years of those reports.
Across seven tax years, Missouri’s ~516 school districts won a grand total of 15 voter-approved operating-levy increases — about two a year, statewide. Thirteen districts in all. In tax years 2024 and 2025, there were none at all: not one district in Missouri raised its operating levy at the ballot box.
And of the 211 districts now sitting below the performance levy, exactly three have won an increase in those seven years — Macon Co. R-I (2018), Marshall (2023) and Oregon-Howell R-III (2023). All three are still below $3.43 today, even after their win.
So the statute directs 211 districts toward a remedy that, on the recent record, roughly two districts a year in the entire state manage to obtain — and that, for the three below-$3.43 districts who did obtain it, was not enough to clear the bar anyway.
District
County
Voters last raised the operating levy
2025 operating levy
Oregon-Howell R-III
Oregon
2023
$3.24 — still below $3.43
Marshall
Saline
2023
$3.37 — still below $3.43
Rolla 31
Phelps
2023
$3.66
East Buchanan Co. C-1
Buchanan
2023
$5.87
Savannah R-III
Andrew
2022
$3.79
Appleton City R-II
St. Clair
2021
$4.17
Blue Springs R-IV
Jackson
2021
$4.00
Walnut Grove R-V
Greene
2021
$4.28
Couch R-I
Oregon
2020
$4.11
Orchard Farm R-V
St. Charles
2020
$3.75
Macon Co. R-I
Macon
2018
$3.38 — still below $3.43
Shelby Co. R-IV
Shelby
2018
$4.41
Tri-County R-VII
Daviess
2018
$4.52
Every other one of Missouri’s districts — 503 of them — has not won a voter-approved operating-levy increase in any year we can see. Source: Missouri State Auditor, Property Tax Rates reports for 2018 and 2020–2025, Appendixes VII and VIII (flag A = new voter-approved rate; flag B = voter-approved change to an existing levy).
Two honest limits on this count. First, it can only see elections that passed. The Auditor records rates, not ballots — so a district that appears nowhere on this list may never have asked its voters, or may have asked and been told no. Second, we have not yet obtained the 2019 report, so a levy increase approved in that one year would be missed here.
And the remedy does not even require a supermajority. It is easy to assume these elections fail because Missouri sets a high bar. It does not. Article X, Section 11(c) of the Missouri Constitution requires only a simple majority to raise a school district’s operating levy, all the way up to a total levy of $6.00 — a ceiling no district in this group is remotely near. (The four-sevenths supermajority most people have in mind, 57.14%, applies to bond issues, which build buildings; it does not apply to the operating levy, which pays teachers.) The same section also lets a school board put the question back to voters as often as it likes.
So the remedy the statute points to needs a bare majority, can be attempted every year, and is still obtained by roughly two districts a year in the entire state. Whatever is stopping these communities, it is not the size of the majority the law asks them to assemble.
We went looking for the failures. They are not recorded anywhere.
The obvious next question is the one that matters most: of the 211 districts below the performance levy, how many asked their voters and were refused? A district that tried and lost is telling a very different story from one that never tried. So we went to find out. Missouri does not keep this information — not anywhere, not in any form we could obtain.
The Secretary of State publishes certified returns for state offices and statewide measures; local ballot issues are certified by county election authorities and are not compiled by the state. DESE publishes nothing on levy elections. RSMo 162.201does require county clerks to certify school election results to the state board of education — but read it closely and it governs the formation of new districts, not tax levies. Ballotpedia, the only national aggregator of local ballot measures, states its own scope plainly: it covers measures within the 100 largest cities in the United States, and state capitals. In Missouri that means Kansas City, St. Louis and Jefferson City. It reaches 13 of the 211 districts and is structurally blind to the other 198 — 94% of them. Oregon County, whose district actually won a levy election in 2023, has an empty page.
The records do exist — scattered across 76 separate county election authorities, and no public body has ever put them together.
Somebody has, though. The bond underwriters. The firms that run these campaigns for districts keep score, because knowing which communities say yes and which say no is their business. L.J. Hart & Company, one of the largest school-finance houses in Missouri, advertises “Election Results” as a standing service line. So the tally is kept. It is simply kept privately, by the people selling the bonds — and not by the state that is about to declare 211 districts guilty of insufficient effort. We have asked; if we obtain it, it will appear here.
Sit with what that means. From 1 July 2026, Missouri requires 211 school districts to justify themselves against a standard most of them cannot reach, and the statute’s implicit remedy is: go and ask your voters. The state can tell you exactly which districts succeeded — a successful election changes the tax rate, and tax rates are recorded meticulously. It keeps no record whatsoever of which districts tried. The single fact that would show whether “insufficient local effort” is a fair description of these communities is the one fact Missouri has never thought to write down.
Here is one that did ask. You will not find it in any state record.
In April 2026, Harrisburg R-VIII in Boone County put an operating levy increase to its voters. They said no — 300 votes to 330. Thirty votes. The district is now working through the resulting budget shortfall, and its board is putting the question back on the ballot — which Missouri law expressly permits, at any time, with no waiting period.
Harrisburg asked. Harrisburg was refused. And because the tax rate never changed, Harrisburg appears in no state dataset as having tried at all. It is simply another district sitting below $3.43 — indistinguishable, in Missouri’s own records, from a district that never went to its voters. When it files the notice the statute now requires, any shortfall it reports will be “deemed to be a result of insufficient local effort.”
Four hundred and one of its neighbours voted in the school board race on the very same ballot. This is not a community that failed to show up. It is a community that turned out, considered the question, and narrowly declined — and the state has no way to know it, and no interest in finding out.
Across seven tax years of State Auditor reports, Missouri districts won 15 voter-approved operating-levy increases — about two a year statewide, across 13 districts, and none at all in 2024 or 2025. Of the 211 districts below the $3.43 performance levy, three have won one, and all three remain below $3.43.
Our interpretation
The statute’s implicit answer to a district below the performance levy is: go and ask your voters. On the recent record, that remedy is obtained by roughly two districts a year in the entire state — and for the three below-$3.43 districts that did obtain it, it was not enough to clear the bar.
What this cannot establish
This count sees elections that passed. The Auditor records tax rates, not ballots, so a district that never appears may never have asked its voters — or may have asked and been told no. This site therefore says a district has not succeeded, never that it has not asked. We searched for the failures and established that no such record exists in Missouri at any level above the individual county clerk (see above) — so the distinction cannot presently be drawn by anyone, including the state. We also do not hold the 2019 report, so an increase approved in that single year would be missed.
WHAT YOU ACTUALLY PAY
The whole school tax bill, not just the operating rate
The map above shows the rate that pays teachers. This one shows the rate that leaves your pocket — operating plus the debt-service levy that repays bonds for buildings. 327 of Missouri’s 516 districts carry a debt-service levy, so for nearly two-thirds of the state these two maps are different maps.
Total school levy (operating + debt service) per $100 of assessed value, 2025. Missouri State Auditor. The median district levies $3.60 for operations but $4.12 in total.
A caution before you compare districts on this map. A district that recently built a school carries heavy debt service and looks like a high-tax district; one that has not built anything in thirty years looks cheap. Rank Missouri by total levy and you are partly ranking it by how recently each town built something — which says nothing about what reaches a classroom. A large gap between this map and the one above usually means the opposite of stinginess: that community voted to tax itself in order to build.
LEVY CHANGE · PICK YOUR BASELINE
How the levy has shifted over time
Pick a baseline year to see how much each district’s operating levy actually moved — the rate it truly charged, not the ceiling it was allowed to charge. Blue means the levy rose; red means it fell.
Missouri’s school levies have barely moved in twelve years — and where they moved, they mostly moved down. Between 2013 and 2025 the median district’s operating levy did not move at all — it is within a third of a cent of where it started. 256 districts levied more; 189 levied less; 71 sit within half a cent of where they began. That is not a story about districts choosing to tax more.
The biggest drops are not frugality — they are the Hancock Amendment. When assessed valuation rises, Missouri law forces a district to roll its levy back so revenue stays roughly flat. Every one of the five largest declines is a metropolitan district whose property values climbed: Webster Groves fell $2.00 (from $5.39 to $3.39), Center 58 $1.85, Jennings $1.48, Valley Park $1.47, Francis Howell $1.41. Their tax bills did not fall by anything like that much; their rates did, because the base underneath them grew. Van-Far R-I is the same story in miniature — the Huck Finn Solar Project nearly doubled its tax base in one year, and its levy rolled straight back.
The largest increases run the other way — small, property-poor districts that went to their voters: Cooter R-IV (+$1.31), Festus R-VI (+$1.23), Green Ridge R-VIII (+$1.18), Mirabile C-1 (+$1.12).
The operating levy each district actually levied, 2025 versus the baseline year you choose. Use the Levy Baseline Year slider on the map to change the comparison year (2013–2024). Excludes debt service. Source: Missouri State Auditor, Property Tax Rates, 2013–2025.
DEBT, BUILDING AND RESERVES
Who is building — and who is borrowing to do it
The levy maps show what districts charge. This one shows what they have built, what they still owe, and what they are holding in the bank. Use the selector on the map to switch between the three.
$9.2B
of school bond debt outstanding statewide
Census F-33 · FY2024
174
districts owe nothing at all — and 161 of them are rural
Census F-33 · FY2024
$359M
paid in interest on school debt in one year — $417 per student
Census F-33 · FY2024
Being debt-free is not a badge. It is usually a symptom. A third of Missouri’s districts — 174 of 516 — carry no long-term debt whatsoever. That sounds like prudence until you see who they are: 161 are rural, 11 are towns, and exactly 2 are suburbs. Borrowing requires a tax base to borrow against, and a community able to carry the payments. Districts with no debt are, overwhelmingly, districts with nothing to build with.
The gradient runs straight down the locale ladder. Among districts that do carry debt, the median city district owes $14,903 per student, the median suburb $13,826, the median town $10,409 — and the median rural district $7,166. The same ordering shows up in what they actually spent on buildings last year: $2,211 per student in city districts against $1,062 in rural ones. The buildings follow the tax base, exactly as the dime test predicts.
How to read it: darker shading means a larger amount per student. Pale districts owe, spend or hold less per student; dark districts more. Use the selector to switch between debt, capital spending and reserves.
Use the Money Indicator selector to switch between long-term debt per student, capital spending per student, and cash reserves per student. Darker = higher. The color scale is clamped at the 5th and 95th percentiles so the map stays readable; the tooltip always shows the district’s true value. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Survey of School System Finances (F-33), fiscal year 2024.
A story we published, chased down, and had to take back. Until 13 July 2026 this page carried an “open question”: that 38 districts held $1.6 billion of debt while levying nothing to repay it, and that 21 of them were wealthy suburbs — Parkway, Ladue, Lindbergh, Webster Groves. It looked like the best story on the site.
It was our own data error. We went to run it down, and the mystery dissolved. Those 21 districts all levy a debt-service tax, every year, exactly as you would expect. Ladue levies 86¢. Hazelwood levies $1.24. Normandy levies $1.80. The State Auditor’s machine-readable export — the file we built from — reports a rate of $0.0000 for St. Louis County districts in most years, while the Auditor’s own printed report prints the real rate on the page. We had been reading the gap as a fact about school finance.
The tell was that the pattern was too clean. All 21 districts appeared to have stopped levying in the same year, and started again in the same year — Normandy, the poorest district in the state, moving in perfect lockstep with Ladue, the richest. Twenty-one school boards do not coordinate like that. Real behaviour is messy; only bad data is tidy.
Every figure is now taken from the printed report and reconciled against DESE’s independent record: 20 of the 21 match to the cent. The corrected count of districts carrying a debt-service levy is 327, not 306, and the median total school levy is $4.12, not $4.08. The full correction is on the corrections page.
What is actually left, once the error is removed, is a much smaller and quieter thing.Seventeen districts carry long-term debt while levying nothing for debt service. They hold $10.6 million between them — about one-tenth of one percent of Missouri’s school debt, not 17% of it. Sixteen are rural and one is a town. Not one is a suburb. The largest owes $2.7 million; nine of them owe under $200,000.
These are almost certainly small residual obligations — lease-purchases and equipment financing rather than voter-approved bonds — being paid off out of operating funds because they are too small to be worth a dedicated tax. That is an unremarkable answer, and it is the true one. We would rather print it than keep a striking story that was never real.
WHAT THIS PAGE MEANS
Six maps, four ways of reading them
The maps above describe the same underlying fact from six angles: Missouri asks its school districts to fund themselves largely from local property, and Missouri districts do not have remotely comparable property. What that fact means depends on where you sit.
If you’re a parent or student
Your school’s budget is not mostly a measure of how much your community cares. It is mostly a measure of what your community owns.
Two towns can vote for identical tax rates and end up with schools that are funded eighteen times apart, because one has a power plant or a shopping district in its boundaries and the other has farmland. If your district looks red on these maps, that is not a verdict on your neighbors or your teachers. It is a description of the tax base they were handed.
If you’re an educator or board member
These maps give you the comparison your budget conversations usually lack: not just what you spend, but what you could raise if you tried harder — and how that compares to districts making the same effort elsewhere.
The dime test is the number to carry into a levy campaign. If a ten-cent increase brings your district $40 per student and brings a suburban district $700, that is worth saying out loud, with the map on the screen behind you.
If you’re a policymaker or legislator
The foundation formula exists precisely to compensate for the gaps on these maps. The honest question these visuals raise is how completely it does so — and the local-share map suggests the answer varies enormously by district.
Note also what depends on annual appropriation: 274 districts rely on the Baseline Salary Grant to reach the $40,000 teacher minimum. That grant is a yearly decision, and the map of who needs it is essentially a map of who has no property to tax.
If you’re a taxpayer or community member
A high tax levy does not mean a well-funded school, and a low levy does not mean a stingy community. Effort and result come apart in Missouri, and these maps show exactly where.
Before you judge a district’s spending, look at what a dime raises there. Some of Missouri’s highest-taxing communities are among its lowest-funded schools — and they are trying hardest.
Questions worth asking about your own district
What does a dime raise here — and what would it raise in the district next door? (Use the calculator above; the answer often surprises people who have lived here their whole lives.)
What share of our budget comes from local taxes rather than the state? If we are heavily state-dependent, what happens to us in a year the legislature tightens?
What is our total school levy, and how much of it is operating versus debt service? A district can look like a modest taxer on the operating map while its residents are paying a good deal more, because the bond payments are on a separate line.
How close is our operating levy to the ceiling? If we are already near it, we have asked our taxpayers for nearly everything the law allows without a vote — and what we got is what these maps show.
How does our per-pupil spending compare to districts of a similar size, not just similar geography? Small districts spend more per child for reasons that have nothing to do with generosity.
QUESTIONS OR DATA SUGGESTIONS?
Contact Dr. Jon Turner
Associate Professor of Educational Leadership · Missouri State University, Springfield MO