MAPLE CITY -- A Leelanau County school district picked up close to $2 million in federal funds to help offset lost income from nontaxable national park property within its borders.
The Glen Lake Community Schools board of education now will decide how to spend the $1.7 million grant.
About 30 percent of the district's tax base includes land in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, the majority of which stretches between Empire, Glen Arbor and Cleveland townships.
School administrators have not been able to collect taxes on the land since Congress created the national park in the 1970s.
"A significant portion of the land was removed from residential use," Superintendent Joan Groening said. "This grant really goes to address that."
Groening spent more than two years poring over tax records to identify every parcel, when the federal government acquired it and who had owned it -- about 46,000 parcels spanning 25 years.
School districts qualify for the grant if the land was taken after 1938 and has an assessed value of 10 percent or more of all property within their boundaries, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
About 250 school districts in the country receive the grants each year.
Roughly 27,000 acres of national park property lie within Glen Lake, Groening said.
Empire Township alone has about 7,600 acres of national park land, with an assessed value of roughly $106 million, township assessor Chris Krellwitz said.
Glen Lake teachers, administrators and board members now will determine the priority spending areas to benefit from the grant, Groening said. Topping the list of needs are technology upgrades, new science equipment, furniture, textbooks and buses.
She said technology likely will be first, with the hope that some new items can be in place before students return to school in September.
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