Who gets punished for the education planners' "mistakes"?

Bozeman Braces for Another School Bond Vote

By Marjorie Smith, 1-17-07

Here we go again. Cantankerous Bozeman seems poised to leap into another battle as mail ballots go out to residents of the city’s elementary school district this week for a bond issue to supplement funds already voted to build a new Chief Joseph Middle School.

Or maybe not. When you listen to the explanations of the need and look at the designs, it seems a slam dunk. If we don’t approve this bond issue, education for our sixth, seventh, and eighth graders will take a giant step backward and Bozeman will no longer lead the state of Montana in educational standards and accomplishments.

But here’s what’s likely to set the talk radio crowd to jabbering: we just passed a $55 million bond issue in 2005. That was to renovate the high school, buy land for a future second high school, and buy land and build a new middle school (the current Chief Joseph Middle School is next the to high school and that building will be incorporated into the renovated high school).

The school board is coming back to the well again because of some mistakes in the calculations for the earlier bond issue. And what the educators and the volunteers orchestrating an on-going letter-writing campaign fear is that there are hardliners and anti-tax folks out there who think the school planners should be punished for their mistakes.

The rest of us are crying “Whatever you do, don’t punish our most vulnerable kids.” (Come on, think back – how happy were you in junior high?) Or as School Trustee ruce Grubbs put it at one of the recent information meetings on the bond issue, “If you want to punish someone, punish me. Don’t re-elect me to the board. But don’t punish the kids.”

Two of the “mistakes” that led to the inadequate estimates in the 2005 bond issue seem almost inevitable. The planners had allowed for a 12 percent inflation rate but with a construction boom underway in Gallatin County causing construction wages to go up and the escalation in prices of materials caused by events like Hurricane Katrina recovery and China’s explosive construction boom, the inflation rate has turned out to be 30 percent.

And then there were enrollment projections. At the time the $55 million bond issue was put together, it looked as if student numbers were leveling off in Bozeman. But the past two years have seen unexpected growth, especially in the younger grades, so that where before it looked like CJMS could expect a maximum enrollment of 600, it’s now clear that we need to be planning for 750.

The third mistake should give us all pause, because it happened when planners forgot to pay enough attention to the middle schoolers (which would also appear to be the trend on a national level). Focused as they were on fixing the 50-year-old high school, Bozeman school planners used a national standard to figure out how big a middle school they needed to build to serve 600 students. Instead of looking at what they already had (109,000 square feet – and that’s after loaning one wing to Bozeman High School for overflow classrooms) they planned 84,000 square feet for 600 students. By the time you subtract the area that can’t be built because of inflation, our students would be shoehorned into space much less than the national average.

And Bozeman kids and educators are used to having space – and programs -- that apparently don’t make the cut nationwide. Music classes, for instance. Bozeman has a phenomenally successful music program that starts in the elementary grades, is developed in middle school with choruses, orchestra and band, and culminates in award-winning programs at the high school. If voters turn down the bond, there will be no more music at Chief Joseph – or at Bozeman’s other middle school, the relatively new Sacajawea. Music classrooms there would have to be converted to regular classrooms to absorb the students that wouldn’t fit into the new Chief Joseph.

Even more startling in our sports-obsessed, obesity-plagued society, “health enhancement spaces” (we used to call them gyms) are apparently not part of the national standard for middle schools. So once again, if a new Chief Joseph is built without gym space, that space at Sacajawea will also have to be sacrificed to make room for some of the Chief Joseph students.

There are other factors that affect the school that trustees and educators want to build. They’re hoping to build an energy star rated school which means more expensive construction to accommodate solar planning principles that will lead to less expensive utility costs through the school’s lifetime and less impact on the environment. And there have been changes in the building code since Bozeman constructed the Sacajawea Middle School. Space required for the school’s mechanical operations – basically ventilation and heating – have gone up by 2000 square feet since the original bond issue.

The school planners have impressive visual aids to explain the project to all interested people, including a “drive around” virtual “movie” to show what the school they hope to build will look like from every angle. Chief Joseph Principal Diane Cashell pointed out that along with the gyms and music rooms that would be lost if the bond issue doesn’t pass, all the grass and trees and pavement shown in the virtual tour would also have to be eliminated.

So who could possibly oppose the bond issue? Understandably, there will be people who feel they cannot absorb any more property taxes, even though the educators predict the bond’s impact to be $10.64 a year for each assessed $100,000 value of a home. (Someone at a meeting I attended pointed out this adds up to about three lattes a year, although I’m guessing that the folks most worried about their tax bills are not latte drinkers.)

Then there is the woman whom I know as a strong supporter of education and progressive causes who sent out an e-mail to her friends and contacts urging them to vote against the bond issue. It turns out that her reason is that she doesn’t like the plans for the renovated Bozeman High School – it doesn’t live up to the impressive structure she hoped for when she voted for the original $55 million bond issue. She advocates voting down this supplemental bond so we can go back to the drawing board and build the high school she feels this community really deserves.

Well, I can understand her disappointment. It would have been nice to have a totally new high school. But after the thousands of volunteer and school staff hours that have gone into adjusting to the reality of what the community can build for the money available, I can’t bear to think of going back to square one. Plus where would we put all those students in the meantime? In the first week after the holidays this month, Chief Joseph enrolled 16 new students.

Teachers at the high school have been pushing their teaching lives around on carts for years because there are not enough classrooms for each teacher to have his or her own room. If the current bond issue doesn’t pass, the middle school teachers will be doing the same thing. The recommended separation of class areas between the various grades will be difficult to accomplish. And with no music classes and no health enhancement programs, we’ll be condemning our most vulnerable kids (Come on! Nobody gets out of adolescence entirely unscathed!) to a much less adequate education than we’ve been giving them.

It all seems so clear to me. I hope a majority of the voters in the Bozeman elementary district agree!

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