The U.S. Constitution may guarantee a free public education, but the reality is there’s a stiff cost associated with reading, writing, arithmetic and beyond -- just ask a taxpayer.

Educating Aurora School District 4R students is costing over $13 million this year with $8.5 million coming from local property taxes.

Salaries, textbooks, utilities, transportation, maintenance and supplies ... the expense list goes on and on.

And when 82.9 percent of the budget goes to employee salaries and benefits, there aren’t a lot of places where enough cuts can be made to keep the budget from spiraling upward each year.

Couple that with the fact Rule 10 -- a document Aurora Supt. Larry Ramaekers calls the "school bible" -- mandates schools keep up-to-date on textbook purchases at $40,000 to $50,000 per subject area or grade level and state aid keeps declining, and you have the recipe for tax hikes.

The Aurora school budget has jumped a little over $2.6 million in the last five years and the tax asking has increased by more than $2 million.

Ramaekers said it’s hard for some to understand why the budget keeps going up at the same time student enrollment is declining, though he’s quick to offer an explanation.

"That’s a common misconception that the budget should go down because enrollment is down," he said. "But that’s not so when the enrollment decline is spread across 13 grades."

Just because there are four fewer students in fourth grade, you can’t eliminate a teacher, he said. And you still have the same transportation costs, the same utility costs, the same maintenance costs and you still have to buy textbooks and other supplies.

Aurora has 105 fewer students than it did 15 years ago when there were 84 teachers on staff, yet there are 26 more teachers.

While teacher numbers increased slowly over the years, not reaching 100 until five years ago, the number jumped by four this year alone because stimulus funds allowed for the hiring of a class-size reduction teacher, as well as positions in reading recovery, deaf education and the Title 1 program.

The year before, the teaching staff increased by one with the hiring of a school psychologist.

The number of teachers does impact the overall budget, especially since negotiations between the Aurora Education Association and Aurora Board of Education typically resulted in a base salary increase.

Fifteen years ago, when there were 84 teachers, the base salary was $19,400.

Today, with 110 teachers, the base salary is $28,600.

While it’s almost a foregone conclusion that the base salary will go up each year, the percent of increase is a variable.

Ramaekers said educators always have the option of appealing to the Commission of Industrial Relations if the two negotiating sides can’t come to agreement.

When that happens, he said the District 4R salary schedule will be compared to other schools of like size and the CIR will determine if Aurora teachers’ salaries are comparable.

"Before we go into negotiations, we compare our salary schedule to other schools in our conference," he explained. "We take our teachers and place them on the other schools’ salary schedule to come up with a factor you multiply by each school’s base salary to come up with a total salary figure."

That calculation resulted in a finding that Aurora had dropped to sixth place in the conference for salaries and was below the mean and the median.

"That’s not where the school board wanted the school to be," Ramaekers said, "and it dictated what they would do when they sat down for negotiations."

Beyond salaries and benefits, the school budget also is impacted by discretionary funds -- such as the $70,000 budget each year for purchase of a new bus, along with utility expenses.

"We budget $70,000 every year to buy a new bus. If you get out of that rotation, you can get into real trouble," Ramaekers said. "A few years back they got out of rotation and had to buy multiple buses in one year."

Heating and electrical expenses also are out of the school’s control, as are fuel costs for the bus fleet.

See this week's News-Register for a more complete story and statistical comparisons of tax asking, tax levies, state aid and tax impacts on a typical Aurora home.