Duval Schools' headquarters building on March 3, 2026. The School Board wants voters to renew a property tax that helps pay teachers. | Megan Mallicoat, Jacksonville Today
Published on March 4, 2026 at 3:18 pm
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The Duval County School Board will ask voters to renew a property tax that helps the district pay teachers a competitive salary.
The 1-mill ad valorem tax generates more than $120 million for the district each year. For average homeowners in Jacksonville, 1 mill, or $1 in tax per $1,000 of value, translates to about $300 per year. Voters first approved the tax in 2022.
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In addition to giving teachers a salary bump of about $5,000, it also supports arts and athletics programs.
The board voted 6-1 on Tuesday to put the renewal on the ballot. Board Chair Charlotte Joyce was the lone no vote.
District 4 representative Darryl Willie said the tax’s impact is visible across the community in the form of turf fields, band uniforms and more.
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“There’s so many places that this touches,” Willie said. “I think that we would be doing a huge disservice if we stripped that away from our schools and our students in our community right now.”
Melody Bolduc, whose District 7 includes Mandarin, said she supported renewing the tax but said also that she’s “really grateful” the state Legislature is pursuing property tax reforms.
“I wholeheartedly support requesting this to be on the ballot,” Bolduc said.
Property tax opposition
But Joyce, who also voted against the original resolution in 2022, said she could not support asking taxpayers to continue paying the tax.
“I do believe with all my heart that our teachers need to be compensated,” Joyce said Tuesday. “I don’t think that we can get that out of the budget right now unless there is some real deep diving and some combing.”
At a workshop last month, she’d proposed cutting the tax in half — so the teacher pay portion of the funding could be retained — but didn’t find support for a half-mill levy from her fellow board members.
On Tuesday, Joyce said she’d been at the property appraiser’s office in recent days and observed a long line of people “wanting and needing exemptions and people that could not afford their taxes on their house.”
“I can’t support the whole thing because to me, the arts and athletics are a luxury when I saw people with my own eyes that couldn’t afford the taxes on their house,” Joyce said.
Most Florida homeowners are eligible for homestead and other exemptions that reduce their property taxes — but first-time applicants must apply by the property appraiser’s annual deadline of March 1.
Schoolhouse block
The Jacksonville City Council must now sign off on the millage referendum before it can appear on ballots later this year.
City Council member Ron Salem is halfway through his second term and was chair of the council’s Finance Committee when the tax referendum was first proposed in 2022. He said he didn’t realize the School Board was discussing renewal.
“I would welcome them to come, and I’d like to hear exactly how they’re going to use it,” Salem told Jacksonville Today. “ I mean, 1 mill is quite a bit.”
Salem voted in favor of adding the referendum to the ballot in 2022. He’s still a member of the council’s Finance Committee, and he currently chairs the special committee on Duval DOGE.
In 2022, this step became a point of conflict between the two elected bodies. The Office of General Counsel — which provides legal counsel to both groups — ultimately advised the City Council its vote was “ministerial” — that it was obligated to add the question to the ballot as directed by the School Board.
The referendum passed with support from about 53.5% of Duval County voters.
The district says Duval County is one of 30 districts in Florida that use voter-approved property taxes to help pay for public schools. Locally, St. Johns County voters approved a similar measure during the last election cycle, and Nassau County voters did so in 2023.
Jacksonville Today reporter Mike Mendenhall contributed to this story.
