Bond won’t be on May ballot
March 26, 2008
By Laura Geggel
After failing to pass for a third time, the Snoqualmie Valley School District board has decided not to rerun in May a proposed school bond that would provide a second high school.
The bond, at 58.65 percent approval Tuesday, needs 106 yes votes to reach the 60 percent supermajority required to pass the bond.
The bond received 455 more yes votes and 298 more no votes than it did last May. The school board has the opportunity to run the bond again in August, November or February.
Volunteers from Valley Voters for Education plan to analyze the voting results, before attempting a new bond campaign.
“I was fairly happy to hear they were not going to rerun it in May,” said Cathy Renner, a mother at the school board meeting March 20. “As much as I wished it had passed, I don’t think we’re going to get a different outcome if we had run it in May.”
The bond may have failed, but students continue to pour into the district. The entire district grew 2 percent between the 2006 and 2007 school years to 5,423 students. The projected October 2008 enrollment is expected to jump 2.5 percent, with an entering ninth-grade class of 433. In 2003, the freshman class numbered 361.
Growth on Snoqualmie Ridge continues, with up to 4,000 new homes planned in the next five years. The development tally has reached approximately 2,600 occupied homes in the past 10 years. North Bend may also experience more construction as the water moratorium lifts.
To compensate for student growth in the short term, the school district plans to add five to seven classrooms to Mount Si High School. Chief Kanim Middle School, which will see a decrease in enrollment next year with the addition of Twin Falls Middle School, will give two portable classrooms.
The Temporary Alternative Placement Program will move to Snoqualmie Middle School to open up another classroom for high school students. The program is geared toward middle-school-aged children who benefit from smaller class sizes with one teacher to five students.
Several other portables may find their way to the high school campus, although the arrangement and number will not be verified until April.
“We hope to address overcrowding using existing resources,” said Superintendent Joel Aune.
Aune said that the school board needed to step back and gain a different perspective on how to market the bond.
“It’s time to redirect the conversation from overcrowding to what happens in those classrooms,” said school board member Kathryn Lerner. “We don’t want to just sell the buildings and spaces but what happens in those buildings and spaces.”
If the bond continues to fail, Aune said they may consider double shifting, year-round school, grade-level reconfiguration, re-zoning of attendance boundaries, and master schedule changes.
The board also said it was considering using Snoqualmie Middle School for extra classroom space, although several parents at the school board meeting objected to mixing older teenagers with middle school students.
Other audience members vented their feelings on the school bond’s failure and expressed their disappointment that the district did not have a detailed Plan B.
Other parents said they had heard of people who voted no to voice their frustration about how the high school handled the Martin Luther King Jr. Day assembly. The assembly’s speaker, the Rev. Ken Hutcherson, was booed by one teacher and questioned by another about how he could support equal rights when he did not endorse rights for gay people.
“I don’t think that situation helped the bond at all,” Renner said. “You have parents with very strong feelings. Because of those feelings, even if they believe in the new school, there have been stories of their voting no because that’s the only way of making their voices heard.”
Another mother, Susan Husa, asked why the school board was deciding to temporarily step back from the bond.
“We’re looking at moving out of the community (because of the situation),” she said.
Other speakers at the school board meeting confirmed that many parents of fourth-graders were panicking; if the bond had passed, this year’s fourth-graders would have been the first freshman class to enter the new high school.
The school board said it would use the extra time to review its successes and its lessons learned.
“We have a number of reasons to be optimistic,” Aune said. “Fifty-eight percent is a solid base. I wish we hadn’t been stuck there the last three years.”
Reporter Laura Geggel can be reached at 392-6434 x221 or lgeggel@snovalleystar.com.
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