Bond debt slows school annexations | News, Sports, Employment

Jill Schramm/MDN Ward County Schools Superintendent Jodi Johnson looks at a map of color-coded school districts. In the center is the Minot Public School District, shown in blue.

Today, Ward County families think twice before annexing property into another school district.

Ward County Schools Superintendent Jodi Johnson said the number of annexation applications has declined this year, largely because of the annexation board’s position that property owners retain an obligation to pay off debts in their former districts.

Johnson said the five-member annexation board has begun to exercise authority it had not previously used to tie debt to property. The board wants annexation requests to be based on educational improvements, rather than financial considerations, he said.

“A bond is approved by the people who live in the district who have the vote, and it is not just the majority, it is 60 percent,” Johnson explained. “What they are saying is that you were part of that district when that happened.”

The sum of a previous district’s bond payment and the new district’s property taxes and any bond payments can have a big impact on your pocketbook. Bonds are typically long-term. Minot’s bond has a maximum term of 20 years.

There are families willing to make payments to two districts, but most annexation applicants change their minds when informed of the tax bill, Johnson said.

Until the drop in applications this year, Johnson said, a few factors had been driving an increase in annexation applications.

The closure of school buildings in the Lewis and Clark district, which included Berthold, Plaza, Makoti and Ryder, caused a large portion of the district in northern McLean and southern Ward counties to be annexed into the Max School District in 2011.

The opening of Minot’s John Hoeven Elementary School on the Nedrose Public School District boundary in 2016 prompted calls to move numerous residential lots from Nedrose into the Minot district so children could attend the neighborhood school.

Minot’s decision not to allow open enrollment because of capacity issues also encouraged some families to seek annexation, Johnson said. While families can obtain a tuition waiver to attend a school in Minot, that route would not allow them to choose the school and could result in significant travel from their homes, she said.

Minot voters’ approval of a large bond issue for a new high school in December 2021 led to annexation in the other direction, as some property owners opted to move to lower-tax districts.

Annexation carries certain requirements that may also hamper some applications, Johnson added.

The applicant must have a school-aged child and live on land that touches another property already in the new district. Johnson said applicants can include neighboring land in an annexation application to create that contiguous property, but signed approvals from two-thirds of voting-age residents within that area are required. The ability to apply for annexation rests with residents, regardless of ownership.

Situations have arisen where mobile home residents, whose homes are on the same lot as many other mobile homes, have had to obtain permission from two-thirds of the lot’s occupants to annex the property to another school district. That’s often prohibitively expensive, Johnson said.

While apartment renters are dependent on the entire apartment building being annexed, condo owners have no such restriction. Johnson said the county received an opinion from the Attorney General clarifying that a group of condos can be annexed even if other condos that share the same building and roofline are not annexed. Condos that are annexed must only be contiguous to the new school district.

Johnson said annexations are often opposed by the district losing students and supported by the district gaining students. The loss of taxable property is part of the reason, but state foundation aid — about $10,000 per student — also accompanies each student to the new district, Johnson said.

In some annexation cases, families are seeking to move property into the district their children already attend, Johnson said.

Annexations approved by the county board must also be approved by the State Board of Education.