Pickerington Area Taxpayers Alliance

Cool

Thanks for the update on that subject. No sense beating a dead horse. Is the rest of my original posting a dead horse too?

By Mad

toilets for 300 elementary kids?


According to 10/17 SE Messenger, you'll need 5.8298 toilets for 150 girls and 5.8457 toilets for 150 boys. Teachers can use the ally I suppose.

Bottom line up front - our administrators, board, city, township and surrounding municipalities have eaten our lunch and we have no more lunch money! Won't matter for those 5,000 - 6,000 new low-income apartments (free/reduced lunches).

By john b

Polishing their message

It seems to me that the school board does have a responsibility here and part of that responsibility is to listen and to try to make their decisions to form some kind of consensus amount the voters.

In addition conveying their message and what they are doing is just as important. Over the last two years that message has been very inconsistent. In early 2004 they formed a small committee amount the board members and I believe it was Lisa Reade and Wes MonHollen were the committee. As I understand the plan it was to build one school and expand two other schools. There may have been some impatience on some board members to get that to the voters before they had touch bases with those that my have some interest in the proposal. That same impatience also pushed the bubble in their July 2004 work session when they voted to look at a bond issue. Their forced vote was an action I believe they should have not happened. The news media had a field day with it and that raised a lot of mis-trust amount the voters. In their haste they forgot the kiss the teachers butt and this split Jim Brink away from the other four board members. Unfortunately the voters were getting mixed messages during that campaign and rejected the entire package in almost every precinct in the district.

In parallel to this action the school administration was studying the OSFC (in late 2004) and trying to see if they could get state funding or some help with school building funding. Although this all sounds noble on the part of the Board and the administration here again it started sending mixed messages to the voters. Voters not knowing the procedures and how this funding works then fully expect to wait and see if the state will pick up part or most of the tab for these buildings.

Although they claimed that the board looked to the entire community for members to serve on the Facilities Review Commission most that were seated were school insiders. Like the boundaries fiasco a few years ago it looked set up to have a pre-determined outcome. Clearly those that may have disagreed were in the minority and nothing of their input will ever reach the public. Sitting squarely in the middle of this commission was Carla the teacher?’s union president. I understand she had a strong present and most decisions when her way.

To date months after the FRC report I have yet to hear or see the board even discuss the report. Although the report may be flawed it should be open to the public and questions could have been answered before they considered placing the current bond levy on the ballot. I think there is just an urge for the board to get ahead of themselves and when they do that, they raise the trust issues with the voters. What we now hear is that they are trying to sell the voters to pass a bond levy with no ?“official?” study to back it or even a study adopted by the board.

Maybe a little better prep work and they could convince the voters they are all on the same page and that alone would instill some higher level of confidence in the voters.

The School Board and the Box

The school board is often criticized for failing to look ''outside the box'' for solutions to these growth/housing issues. This criticism, however, is really unfair. The truth is, we voters keep boxing them in.

For instance, several years ago, when I was still on the board, we devised a way to significantly reduce overcrowding in our elementaries by reconfiguring grades. We would have moved kindergarten into the vacant space in PHS Central created by PHS North. And we would either have eliminated the middle schools, going to a 1-6 configuration, or we would have gone to a 1-3, 4-6 configuration. In this way we could have put a considerable number of double-wides in mothballs and still put off building a new elementary school for several years. We also would have significantly reduced transportation costs.

The problem, unfortunately, has now far outstripped this solution. No amount of reconfiguring would enable us to squeeze all our kids into the space available. But we received such an uproar from parents and teachers that we completely abandoned the idea.

Another example: the school board went on the ballot, last time around, for one, larger elementary school, that would have saved us taxpayers a bundle. Again we voters refused to go along.

This really leaves the school board with only one viable solution: build two new elementary schools. We've told the school board, in effect, that we do not want any grade reconfiguration, that we do not want vacant high school space used for kindergarten (or, really, for any K-4 kids), and that we want elementaries with an enrollment capacity of 650 students or thereabouts. The school board has offered us, on this November's ballot, what we appear to want.

If we turn down this levy, what is the school board to propose next? What alternatives are left? More double-wides? Split sessions? Year-round school?

This is as good a place for brainstorming as any. I hope that some of you will come up with something.