By Kyle Roberts
CHOUDRANT, La. —Time for the public to decide.
After a majority vote of the Lincoln Parish School Board members Tuesday, voters will now decide if a sales tax consolidation is the right fit for the parish on Saturday, June 27, 2026.
Currently, sales tax collections for the school board are separated into five different .5-cent levies. The proposal would combine these into one 2.5 percent levy, and the plan does not include any additional taxes on the residents of Lincoln Parish.
“There are some dedications in each of those five right now, and that means that the business office (of the LPSB) has to keep up with five different buckets — actually multiple buckets even within those buckets — on where those monies go,” Lucius McGehee of Argent Financial said. “You, as a board, continue to determine what the budget is and how money is appropriated.”
David Ferguson of District No. 2 raised a concern regarding if teachers were going to get “short-changed” if the public votes yes.
“The school board is going to continue to vote on what the salary schedule is, what the 13th check and the 14th check is — you’re going to decide that,” McGehee said, addressing the board. “When you tell the superintendent and the business manage ‘This is how much we’re going to pay (salaries),’ they’re going to dip into that bucket. There’s a lot of money that flows through there, but the decision of what the employees are going to get always happens at this table.
“The way Ruston’s economy is going is that it’s moving from a more agrarian-type economy to a retail-type economy, so that it makes sense to change the tax base more to a retail-based.”
LPSB President Gregg Phillips expanded on McGehee’s points after the meeting.
“The main reason we decided to ask the voters to allow us to consolidate these individual taxes into one is to, first and foremost, consolidate the accounts from five to one,” Phillips said. “Think about having five individual checking accounts you have to run your household. And when it comes time to pay your bills, you have to pull money from each account and label it toward certain items you pay for. For example, the largest bill we pay is payroll. So we have to make payroll out of several of the accounts. This move will allow us to have one account we pay all of our bills from.
“Another reason is our advisors recommend that as we look toward future tax revenue growth in our area (example being Buc-ees), the designations on the current tax structure restrict our ability to use potential increased revenue to help offset some of the costs for new building projects and other needs that come up. We hope to get more sales taxes after Buc-ee’s comes, and we don’t want it to be locked up in designated accounts. We want to use it for as much as possible to benefit the public for their tax dollars.”
The proposal to send to a June public vote was 9-2. Dr. Danielle Williams and Ferguson both voted “no.”
In other new business, the board unanimously voted to make April 20-24, 2026 Support Personnel week and voted to move four school buses from the fleet to surplus.
The district also has approximately 2,500 student Chromebook devices that will reach end-of-life status by the summer of 2027. The board voted to begin the bid process to purchase and replace by utilizing a combination of local and federal funds.
The board also voted 9-2 to move forward with a Construction Management at Risk (CMAR) service to begin plans to convert the current Lincoln Parish Early Childhood Center building at 801 Mississippi Ave. into the main school board office and bus barn. Williams and Ferguson both voted “no.”
At the beginning, new board member Patricia Mims-Brooks was sworn in by attorney Jon Belton to officially become the representative for School District No. 9.
Trisha Pangilinan of Ruston High School was also honored for being named a National Merit Scholar finalist.
Otha Anders of District 10 was absent.
The School Board will meet again on Tuesday, April 9, at 12 p.m. at Cypress Springs Elementary School in Ruston.
