Jill Schramm/MDN Ward County Superintendent of Schools Jodi Johnson looks over a map of color coded school districts. At the center is Minot Public School District, shown in blue.

Ward County families are thinking twice about annexing property into another school district these days.

Ward County Superintendent of Schools Jodi Johnson said the number of annexation requests has dropped this year, in large part because of the position of the annexation board that property owners retain an obligation for debt payments in their former districts.

Johnson said the five-member annexation board has begun exercising previously unused authority to attach bonded indebtedness to property. The board wants educational betterment rather than financial considerations to prompt annexation applications, she explained.

“A bond is passed by the people living in the district that have the vote, and it’s not just the majority, it’s 60 percent,” Johnson explained. “What they are saying is you were part of that district when that passed.”

The sum of a former district’s bond payment and the new district’s property taxes and any bond payment can heavily impact the pocketbook. Typically, bonds are long term. Minot’s bond has a maximum term of 20 years.

There are families willing to make payments to two districts, but most annexation applicants change their minds when made aware of the tax bill, Johnson said.

Until the drop in applications this year, Johnson said, a few factors had been driving an increase in annexation requests.

School building closures in the Lewis & Clark district that included Berthold, Plaza, Makoti and Ryder led to a large portion of the district in northern McLean and southern Ward counties annexing into the Max School District in 2011.

The opening of Minot’s John Hoeven Elementary on the border of the Nedrose Public School District in 2016 prompted requests to move numerous residential lots from Nedrose into the Minot district so children could attend the neighborhood school.

Minot’s decision not to allow open enrollment due to capacity issues also encouraged some families to seek to annex instead, Johnson said. Although families can have tuition waived to attend a school in Minot, that avenue would not allow them the choice of school and could result in significant travel from their homes, she said.

Minot’s voter approval of a large bond issue for a new high school in December 2021 led to annexation in the other direction as some property owners opted to move into districts with lower taxes.

Annexation comes with certain requirements that also can stymie some requests, Johnson added.

An applicant must have a school-age child and live on land that touches other property already in the new district. Johnson said applicants can include neighboring land in an annexation request to create that contiguous property, but signed approvals are required from two-thirds of voting-age residents within that area. The ability to request annexation rests with residents, regardless of ownership.

Situations have arisen in which mobile home residents, whose homes are on a single lot with multiple other mobile homes, have been required to obtain permissions from two-thirds of occupants of the lot to annex the property into another school district. Often, that is prohibitive, Johnson said.

While apartment tenants are dependent on the entire apartment building to annex, condominium owners don’t have that constraint. Johnson said the county received an Attorney’s General opinion clarifying that a group of condominiums can be annexed even though other condos that share the same building and roof line are not being annexed. The annexing condos just need to be contiguous to the new school district.

Annexations commonly are opposed by the district losing students and favored by districts gaining students, Johnson said. The loss of taxable property is part of the reason, but state foundation aid – about $10,000 per student – also follows each student to the new district, Johnson said.

In some annexation cases, families are seeking to move property into the district their children already attend, Johnson said.

Annexations approved by the county board also must be approved by the State Board of Education.