15 years after my family moved from the area, Beavercreek, Ohio is still struggling to keep city schools funded with emergency property-tax levies. [I'm posting this mostly for my family's sake, admittedly.] It never ceases to fail me how many reasons people will come up with to not pay taxes when the tax revenue is demonstrably going toward something that clearly adds value to the community. Certainly, not all taxation is equal, and some taxes are regressive and/or wholly unnecessary, but … having grown up in that school district, I can say that those folks really need it.

When we moved there more than 20 years ago, Beavercreek was an odd duck—a town mostly home to older folks whose kids had moved away, mixed in with military folks who wouldn’t be around more than four or eight years at the most. The oldtimers didn’t really want to pay taxes to educate kids who weren’t going to stay in the community, and … at some level, I guess that I can understand that. But the thing that never failed to amaze me was understanding how short-sighted this was: the military families often chose Beavercreek for its good schools. [I'm fairly sure that's why my folks moved there over, say, Fairborn, which would have been closer to where Dad worked on base for sure.] If you have good schools in a town, you typically have a good quality of life … and those military kids typically were of good stock: studious, responsible, and hard-working. Having us around reinforced the locals’ value systems, which were often the same as our own.

Now, I don’t know what the demographics of the area are anymore—I’ve really only been back once, and that was for a very quick trip. I can tell that the area has exploded in terms of growth, but if you want to be a bedroom community to Dayton [and maybe Cincinnati if you like the commuting thing], you’ve gotta have good schools. But … doesn’t seem like the voters there get that.