Tough times, cheap schools?
Apparently contractors are desperate for work. Maybe a bond project would cost less than expected?
Limited attendance, decent participation
Mediocre turnout at the forum tonight regarding the USD 457 bond issue and the race for District 2 of the Finney County Commission — about a dozen in the audience for the bond portion, a few of them from the school district or the board. I heard one person express relief that there were so many (he was worried nobody would show), while another expressed exasperation that so few attended, considering that those non-attenders might be the one who complain about the result later
Here’s hoping more tuned in on the radio or TV. Or that they didn’t need to, because they know so much about it already. Here’s hoping those people vote — the ones who know about it and let those facts form their opinion for or against the issue. (It’s our right as citizens to vote, but our duty to be informed when we do so.)
Anyway, a few audience members submitted questions to supplement those developed by staff at the Telegram and Western Kansas Broadcast Center. Here are the audience questions, with my paraphrase of respondents’ answers. Those answering questions included Rick Atha, superintendent; Mike Utz, board president; Craig Wheeler, co-chairman of the High School Facilities Study Group; and Stewart Nelson, architect with Gibson, Mancini, Carmichael & Nelson.
The Hugoton school district is proposing a bond for updates/additions that include strengthening their wrestling room for a storm shelter. Does Garden City’s school district bond proposal include similar safety precautions in the new high school as well as the two schools that will be renovated?
Nelson said that yes, the new high school would be set up to provide shelter from storms, with its walk-down gymnasium (the gym would be below ground) providing an ideal place. The early childhood center (an expansion of the current Garfield Elementary School) would include a multi-purpose room designed as a storm shelter. Both shelters would have restrooms immediately adjacent.
Will passing the tax increase help the district start meeting AYP, which it hasn’t done for the past few years?
Atha started by noting that USD 457 barely missed AYP this year and that it made it last year, after two years of failing to do so. “Will this help us? It won’t hurt us, but those targets get higher every year,” he said, adding that by 2014, No Child Left Behind aims for schools to have 100 percent of their students scoring “Proficient” on state tests.
He said the plan will allow for smaller class sizes and giving all teachers classrooms. That means a lot to teachers, he said, because if the difficulties of pushing materials around on a cart and still being prepared for each class. Often it’s the new teachers who wind up on carts. “For them, the question is, ‘Do I stay and continue on a cart until I maybe get a classroom? Or do I go somewhere else?’” It would save the district money if those teachers stayed, because training new employees is expensive, he said.
Wheeler said the high school study committee learned that there are a lot of factors that go into learning. “The primary thing is personal interest and one-on-one time the teacher can give a kid,” he said. But that’s hard to give when teachers are sharing classrooms, etc., and there’s no good place for a teacher to meet privately with a student. The new high school will enable that, he said.
Nelson said architectural research points to the importance of natural light in classrooms and the way it improves learning. All the new high school classrooms would have this. He also said that since the district plans to have a closed lunch at the new school, there would be little opportunity for students to skip out of school — a lower truancy rate can’t hurt test scores. Nelson mentioned GCHS’s planned small learning communities, which would be devoted to certain areas of interest. The district has likened them to small schools within a larger school. That would help students have more sense of involvement, he said, which could translate to achievement.
Utz: “The overall environment is going to change attitudes.”
Will there be an immediate benefit to the community due to expansion of vocational/technical education at the high school?
(Note: This question was submitted by Jeff Crist of the school board.)
Atha: Small learning communities would be based on students career interests and exploring those. Focusing those would allow the district to increase the rigor of its coursework. The communities would be flexible, so a student would be stuck in one after freshman year. “If they learn, ‘This isn’t for me,’ that’s important, too.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Check Thursday’s Telegram for stories on the bond issue forum, the County Commission forum and the role the youth vote could play in all this.
Reminder: Tonight!
The Garden City Telegram and Western Kansas Broadcast Center are co-sponsoring an election forum tonight where you can get your questions answered in person, on TV or on the radio.
WHAT: Candidates forum with County Commission candidates Dave Jones and Cynthia Corn, followed by a forum on the USD 457 bond issue with representatives from the school district, bond committee and architectural firm(s).
WHEN: 6:30 p.m. today for County Commission. School bond forum starts at 7 p.m.
WHERE: City Administration Building, 301 N. Eighth St., Garden City
LISTEN LIVE: KBUF 1030 AM
WATCH LIVE: Channel 8
GET YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED: Submit questions in person tonight or in advance by commenting on this blog, e-mailing newsroom@gctelegram.com or calling Brett Riggs at (620) 275-8500.
Board meeting tidbits
Topics directly related to the bond issue haven’t been on the USD 457 Board of Education agenda for a couple months now, but the issue is still popping up all over the place.
At tonight’s meeting, President Mike Utz kicked it off by announcing that school district staff, board members and community members have given more than 100 presentations on the bond issue to community organizations and gatherings. He also made note of the fact that the Garden City Educators Association has officially endorsed the bond issue. (See previous post on that here.)
Then related issues came up during a presentation by Georgia Matthews Elementary School teachers (schools rotate in giving presentations to the board about their activities). The teachers were talking about the past, present and future of education at Georgia Matthews and discussing the way technology continues to be a growing part of day-to-day learning for children. Superintendent Rick Atha took the opportunity to pose a question he said he received from a concerned patron: Why do schools put so much emphasis on technology? Shouldn’t they teach kids the basics first, then let them learn about computers, etc., after high school? (The question sounds familiar, though I can’t say this bond issue opponent is actually the one who approached Atha.) Anyway, the educators gave the usual set of responses — we’re preparing them for a workforce that runs on technology, this is their world, many things we take for granted now (i.e. cars, washing machines, etc.) once were considered new technology, too.
Finally came discussion from Deb Jarmer, coordinator of career and technical education at USD 457, about the state’s direction on career/tech ed. She said the state follows a “career cluster” model in which students are supposed to pick cluster — say, information technology — that they’d like to learn about as a possible future career. Within that cluster, they might choose a “pathway,” a sequence of courses to help them get there. At the same time, they’re supposed to be getting the basic academic foundations. The thought is that the pathways would feed into colleges and universities, but that students would also emerge from the programs having the career skills they would need to go straight into the workforce.
Jarmer brought the bond issue — or at least plans for the new high school — into the picture when she talked about needs to integrate academics with the technical and workplace skills. The new school building would be based on the concept of “small learning communities” in which students choose a field of interest, and just about all their classes, from the technical ones to math and social studies, are geared to match. They see the same students and same teachers every day as, in theory, all the stuff they’re learning becomes more relevant since they see it all tying together with something they might actually want to do with their lives. The building design would fit into the career/tech ed goal that “skills will no longer be taught in isolation,” Jarmer said.
Off on a tangent
This has nothing to do with the school district bond issue, but it could come in handy on election day. Have you ever gotten into the voting booth feeling all prepared to cast your ballot, only to realize that you know nothing about the judges up for approval? New from the Kansas Commission on Judicial Performance is a Web site that provides evaluations of Kansas district court, Court of Appeals and Supreme Court judges seeking to retain their positions.
According to the commission:
Recommendations regarding judicial retention are prepared by the 13-member Commission as part of the Kansas Judicial Report Card based on many sources, including surveys of attorneys and non-attorneys who have appeared before or had other professional experience with the justices and judges up for retention.
So when you’re not busy cutting through the spin of the presiential campaigns and formulating your view on the USD 457 bond issue, check it out.
Do you care what your newspaper thinks?
The Telegram editorial board came out Saturday in favor of the USD 457 bond issue with an endorsement on the opinion page.
In sum, the editorial frames the bond issue (details here) as an investment that is “affordable, even in a time of economic uncertainty,” saying:
Even in the most trying times, many of our predecessors would have spent their last dime to give their children a better education than they received.
First off, a quick explanation for how the whole endorsement thing works, at least here at the Telegram. Endorsements and other editorials (except staff columns, which have names on them) are written by our publisher, Dena Sattler, based on the reporting the Telegram staff members do and her own research and impressions. Reporters or editors sometimes fact check the editorials, but the opinions expressed should be considered totally separate from our news coverage.
So anyway, here’s the question: Do you care what your newspaper thinks? Is a newspaper endorsement of a candidate or a particular side on an issue really going to affect your vote? In the presidential election, which newspapers endorsed which candidates is the fodder for commentators on cable TV news, but do the editorials have any practical value?
Les Anderson, a print journalism professor at Wichita State University and former newspaper editor, thinks the answer is yes:
I think endorsements do matter, particularly at the local or community level when you’re talking school board or city council or county commission, and even state legislative races, I think people look to newspapers as a source of information for those race. … I think traditionally newspapers have, going back years and years, were looked to as the source for all information. It’s before the advent of TV, before anything we have that’s an electronic media form now, and newspapers were the source.
A separate but equally important question — Should newspapers endorse candidates/causes?
A couple schools of thought here:
- One is the idea that journalists and their media outlets ought to be 100 percent objective, covering the news without formulating opinions. Even though endorsements aren’t generally written by the reporters covering the issues, when a newspaper comes out in favor of or in opposition to a cause or candidate, does that throw the paper’s coverage into question?
- The other view is that journalists are people, too, and that we’re bound to have opinions, try as we might to avoid letting them affect our coverage. There are checks in place to also prevent this — a story works its way through several staff members before it lands on your doorstep in the paper — but still, is it best for media organizations to acknowledge their own views? And we hope people make their decisions based on careful consideration of all the facts, so who better to form an educated opinion than an organization that survives by gathering and sifting through facts?
Anderson’s full interview, provided by WSU, is available here.
What do you want to know?
The Garden City Telegram and Western Kansas Broadcast Center are co-sponsoring an election forum Wednesday night where you can get your questions answered in person, on TV or on the radio.
WHAT: Candidates forum with County Commission candidates Dave Jones and Cynthia Corn, followed by a forum on the USD 457 bond issue with representatives from the school district, bond committee and architectural firm(s).
WHEN: 6:30 p.m. Wednesday for County Commission. School bond forum starts at 7 p.m.
WHERE: City Administration Building, 301 N. Eighth St., Garden City
LISTEN LIVE: Western Kansas Broadcast Center (station TBA)
WATCH LIVE: Channel 8
GET YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED: Submit questions that night or in advance by commenting on this blog, e-mailing newsroom@gctelegram.com or calling Brett Riggs at (620) 275-8500.
My editorial comment: I’m hoping people will show up for this, or at least tune in or read the Telegram’s coverage. Maybe the fact that it’s sponsored by an outside party (i.e. the media) will help, but no one showed up for tonight’s district/chamber sponsored forum who hasn’t heard the school’s presentation at least once before. I hope this means people are educated about the issue, whether their knowledge points them to a “yes” or “no” vote, and that they just don’t need any more information. Anything less would be a shame.
Superintendent on FAQs
Superintendent Rick Atha said there are a couple questions he keeps hearing lately in relation to Garden City USD 457’s bond issue.
Here they are, with the answers he provided:
Q: How many classrooms does the current high school have, and how many would there be in the new school?
A: GCHS has 100 classrooms. (That counts the gym as one room, welding lab as one room, etc.) There are 52 in the main building and the music building, 11 in the trailers that sit outside the school and 37 in J.D. Adams Hall, a separate building on the campus.
The new school would have 132 classrooms. That, of course, adds 32 to the school’s total capacity, or, as Atha put it, 43 more “permanent classrooms.” (The trailers are considered “temporary.”)
The 32 new spaces would allow GCHS’s 14 “traveling teachers” (they push materials from room to room on a cart) to have their own classrooms, and would give space for lowering class size, assuming the district opted after construction to hire more teachers.
Q. How much would architects be paid?
A. According to the cost proposal put together by principal firm Gibson, Mancini, Carmichael & Nelson, of Garden City, and DLR Group, of Overland Park, architects’ fees are 5.75 percent on new construction and 7 percent on renovation.
New construction means the high school, which would cost an estimated total of $92,452,224, including the fees along with land acquisition ($590,000), excavation, etc.
Renovation means conversion of GCHS into a middle school, Abe Hubert Middle School into an elementary school and Garfield Elementary into an early childhood center. These projects are estimated to cost a total of $4,650,000, and the architects’ fees on top of that would be $325,500.
Those fees would be split between the two firms however they decide — that’s not up to the school district, Atha said.
Final forum
Just a reminder the school district and the Garden City Area Chamber of Commerce will be hosting the last of three forums about USD 457’s $97.5 million bond issue. It’s at 5:30 p.m. in the Courtyard of Garden City High School, 1412 N. Main St. The forum includes a tour of the current high school site.
In case anyone hasn’t heard, the bond issue would cover construction of a new, 2,000-student high school (with the infrastructure to be expanded to a 2,500-student school); conversion of the main GCHS building to a middle school, conversion of Abe Hubert Middle School to an elementary school and expansion of Garfield Elementary School to an early childhood center.
Check back here tonight for info on how the forum went.
Bond ballot roundup
For a run-down of school district bond issues voters around the state will see on the ballot Nov. 4, see my story in today’s issue of the Telegram.
Here’s a listing:
- Anthony-Harper USD 361 — $8 million to renovate and remodel three schools (Question 1), and to add a new auxiliary gym/FEMA storm shelter (Question 2)
- Baldwin City USD 348 — $22.9 million for a new primary center, new auditorium, new baseball/softball complex, new practice track and technology upgrades at all schools
- DeSoto USD 232 — $75 million to construct a new 600-student elementary school and expand two high schools
- Garden City USD 457 — $97.5 million for a new high school, conversion of high school to a middle school, conversion of a middle school to an elementary school and expansion of an elementary school into an early childhood center
- Herington USD 487 — $29 million for additions to the middle and high school; a new elementary school, auditorium, gymnasium and track/football facility; remodeling and renovations at sports complex; and tornado shelters
- Holton USD 336 — $21.3 million to construct a new elementary school and an agricultural education building at the high school, plus to repair an exterior wall at the high school
- Hugoton USD 210 — $21 million for renovations at the middle school, middle/high school cafeteria area and athletic facilities, plus a new early childhood center
- Leavenworth USD 453 — $57.8 million for upgrades/expansions at two elementary schools and the high school, construction of a new elementary school and creation of a new activities complex on the high school campus
- Manhattan-Ogden USD 383 — $97.5 million to renovate, remodel and repair 24 buildings in the district, and to add classrooms
- Marysville USD 364 — $25 million for additions to elementary, junior/senior high school and stadium
- Olathe USD 233 — $68 million to pay for additions and renovations at the district’s four high schools
- Sabetha USD 441 — $8.3 million for expansions and improvements at high school and kindergarten-through-12th-grade facility
- Sterling USD 376 — $20.4 million to expand and renovate high school and to replace grade school
- Wichita USD 259 — $370 million for six new schools and 275 new classrooms at other buildings
