Tim Carter: Shouldn't we get a tax refund for schools being closed?

To The Daily Sun,

Have you reached out to your town tax collector in the past month for a partial refund of your real estate taxes? Actually, have you ever looked at your itemized real estate tax bill to see how much of it goes to funding your local schools? It’s a huge portion of your taxes, trust me.

When you pay for something from a store or restaurant and don’t get the value for what you spent, you ask for a refund, right? It’s what’s fair after all.

If you run a business, you wouldn’t stand for paying an employee a full paycheck if they didn’t work full-time, right? That’s only fair unless, of course, you’re a worker in Russia. They have insane labor laws as a friend of mine does legal work in Russia. But I digress.

Our schools have been closed for months. Remote learning has been a dismal failure. Let’s look at the computer log files to see if both students, teachers, and administrators have been online working and touching the keyboard non-stop for hours a day. When school is in session, at least we know the teachers, administrators, and all other school staff are on the school grounds and not out fishing or doing some other non-work pursuit.

If the school employees have been working full time, I want proof. How about you? Don’t you want it too?

Realize that if the teachers, administrators, and other staff have not been working full time, I have no problem paying them for the time they've put in. But I want to know exactly how many hours per week for the past four months they’ve been working.

I reached out to the Meredith tax assessor today asking about my refund. You need to reach out to your tax assessor immediately. Be sure to ask about getting a refund for next year if they continue to keep schools closed.

Tim Carter

Meredith