The Superintendent's Blog

With a fantastic school year underway, I want to pause a moment to share our annual budget update. The goal of this process is always to provide a high-quality education for our students while remaining good stewards of taxpayer resources. This is a responsibility our Board of Education and administrative team take very seriously. After months of planning, analysis, and public discussion, we have finalized our budget for the year ahead.

I am pleased to share that in the 2026–27 school year, Millard Public Schools is lowering its property tax levy from $1.0900 to $1.0352 per $100 of valuation. This drops the levy to the lowest it has been in more than forty years. Even with a district-wide property valuation increase of 4.55%, this levy decrease means the district will collect approximately 1% less in local property tax dollars compared to the prior year. Because our total tax asking is going down, you may have noticed that Millard Public Schools was not listed on the postcards recently mailed by the county highlighting local political subdivisions with tax asking increases.

A few factors made the reduction in the tax levy possible. In addition to our local valuation growth, the district received a one-time funding adjustment of approximately $3.5 million from the state to correct a prior calculation error in the state’s Poverty Allowance formula. Pairing this correction with our local valuation growth and other efficiencies we found after a careful analysis of the budget will allow us to meet our needs while also asking less from our community.

Lowering the tax rate does not mean standing still. This budget allows us to make targeted investments in the core areas that directly impact our students and staff. We are dedicating resources toward a competitive staff compensation increase, adopting a new high-quality English Language Arts curriculum K-12, and continuing planned facility updates to keep some of our older school facilities and infrastructure safe, efficient, and modern.

For the 2026–27 school year, our overall budget growth is 3.26%. To put that into perspective, over the last decade, Millard’s annual budget growth has averaged about 2.8% per year. The increase this year is a direct reflection of broader economic realities - specifically increased cost pressures for supplies, services, and competitive wages for our high-quality staff. We are committed to operating an efficient school system and continue to be one of the lowest per-pupil spending districts in Nebraska.

Building a budget is always a balance between our mission to provide excellent educational experiences for students and making responsible financial decisions with our limited resources and taxpayer dollars. Should you have further questions, please feel free to reach out to our Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Chad Meisgeier, at cmmeisgeier@mpsomaha.org or 402-715-8401.

We remain grateful for the engagement, support, and partnership of the Millard Public Schools community. The 2026-27 school year is off to an outstanding start!