The Half-Cent Sales Surtax Citizens Advisory Committee meets at 4 o’clock Monday afternoon at the Fullerwood Training Center, 10 Hildreth Drive. It advises on a tax with more than nine years left to run.

The Florida Department of Revenue’s rate table lists St. Johns County at a half cent and names it a school capital outlay surtax. The same table says the current half cent was extended effective Jan. 1 of this year and expires Dec. 31, 2035.

Here is what that means for your kid. Under section 212.055(6) of the Florida Statutes, the money can go to “fixed capital expenditures or fixed capital costs associated with the construction, reconstruction, or improvement of school facilities and campuses which have a useful life expectancy of 5 or more years,” to the land under them, to school buses that will last five years, and to technology hardware and software. Then the statute closes the door: “Neither the proceeds of the surtax nor any interest accrued thereto shall be used for operational expenses.” Buildings and buses, not salaries. When a school in this county opens on time, or opens with portables behind it, this is one of the pots the answer came out of.

The statute also requires that the revenue be shared with eligible charter schools, in proportion to their share of total district enrollment. And it required a referendum to levy in the first place, at a rate the statute caps at 0.5 percent.

What the district publishes about this committee

A notice. That is the whole list.

Search the district’s own website for “surtax,” for “half-cent” and for “Citizens Advisory Committee,” and what comes back is meeting notices and nothing else. Monday’s. One for June 8. One for March 9. One for Dec. 15 last year. No agenda comes back for any of them, no minutes, and no page that says who is on the committee, how a person gets on it, or what it decided the last time it met. The address stjohns.k12.fl.us/surtax/ returns a 404, and stjohns.k12.fl.us/halfcent/ returns a page with nothing on it.

None of that makes the meeting secret. It is noticed, it is public, and the address is printed. What it means is narrower. A parent who wants to know what this committee has been doing, before walking into the room on Monday, has nowhere to look it up.

The board itself meets Tuesday, and one item on it is money too

The School Board holds a workshop Tuesday at 9 a.m. in the auditorium at 40 Orange Street and on Webex. Nothing on the agenda is a vote. It runs opening, comments, four topics, public comment, adjournment.

Four topics are listed. The first is a charter academic update covering Treaty Oaks Preparatory Academy and St. Augustine Public Montessori School. The second is safety updates. The third is the VPK performance metric and the district’s own VPK program. The fourth is a retiree health insurance premium rate increase.

The fourth one moves a price. The agenda gives it six words and no figure.

A special School Board meeting on out-of-field teachers had been noticed for that same Tuesday morning slot, and it was cancelled. So was the workshop that had been set for Oct. 6. The next regular School Board meeting is Oct. 13 at 4:30 p.m., with a workshop on legal services immediately after it.

Monday at 4, Fullerwood Training Center, 10 Hildreth Drive. Tuesday at 9, the auditorium at 40 Orange Street, or on Webex. Both are public meetings.