A new school building: some say conservation and some say progress. I think it’s reasonable to assume that most people are in favor of progress, we just don’t all agree that this amount of debt can be defined as “progress.” Just from listening to the various opinions on this issue, I think many people will not be voting out of objectivity but rather from preference. And the facts, as I have been given them, aren’t convincingly in favor of the notion that a multi-million dollar school building is progress, at least at this time. If the cost of a new school is 22 million dollars and the state pays for 52% and the district pays for 48%, then that means that the school district is obligated for $10,560,000. If the interest rate the school is paying is 3% over a 30 year period, the annual payment will be $538,763. If our school district has 800 kids, that is just under $675 per child per year. This is just for the building! 9 mills tax increase will increase a $100,000 assessed value property by $180. So how much of a tax base does the school district need to meet the annual payment of $538,763? Answer: Take $538,763 and divide it by .0018. That means the school district tax base would have to be $299,312,778 for the millage increase to make the annual payment. Does the BIC school district have a tax base of 300 million dollars??? In Craighead county, each mill brings in $23,180. In Mississippi county, each mill brings in $24,288. Add that together and you get $47,288. Multiply that times 9 mill and you get $427,212 which is approximately $111,000 short of the annual payment. My question: “Would renovating the existing buildings not allow for implementation of the same technology at a lesser cost?” Some might argue that a new building would offer greater student unification. What concrete benefits do we get from greater student unification? Our currently less-unified structure is regularly graduating students who are becoming doctors, attorneys, and all sorts of professional people. Is a new school building going improve our current results? What research has anyone offered that indicates student unification in a single building significantly improves student outcomes? And that is the point: student outcomes. I can think of a couple of school districts who do fairly well on testing scores and they educate students within quite a few respective buildings. Does it really take a multi-million dollar building to educate the few students we have in our relatively small community??? If you interviewed your doctor a little, you might find that he didn’t need a multi-million dollar educational facility to achieve his success; many professional people were homeschooled. Many notable successful people including: Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, C.S. Lewis, Mozart, Florence Nightingale, 14 U.S. presidents, 4 U.S. Supreme Court justices, Albert Einstein, Andrew Carnegie, and the list goes on and on were HOME-SCHOOLED. There has been educational research to suggest that home-schoolers in structured settings have outperformed public-schoolers on standardized testing at a fairly dramatic level. If you can achieve that level of success IN YOUR LIVING ROOM, is the cost of having education Cadillac-style in a state-of-the-art facility really worth the expense? As I noted previously we have been regularly graduating students in BIC’s current educational paradigm that are becoming doctors, attorney’s, and professional people of all types. I’d like some hard facts on how a new building is going to improve our current student outcomes. The fact remains that if a student doesn’t want to learn, no amount of buildings or money or technology will instill that motivation. Also,… even though we’ve had some facts and figures thrown at us… what about all the hidden costs? Who has engaged in a building project and it ended up costing exactly what they planned? Rather, it generally costs much much more? Do we really know how much expense we’d run into that hasn’t been planned on or is the real proposal for us to just vote and get committed to the project and just accept the “come what may” mindset? Yes, I’m for progress, but progress that we can afford. As I look around our small community, I see a lot of poverty… and I’m not convinced going millions of dollars in debt is the way to dig our way out of it.
Posted on: Wed, 20 Aug 2014 02:47:40 +0000
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