Finding Funding
A school is named after you. Actually a whole school system.
It’s the “public” school system, which you and others who constitute the public, pay for.
Ray O’Keefe of Spokane is part of the public. He helps support public schools even though his own children have completed their K-12 education.
He thinks it’s unfair that even after Spokane School District 81 patrons passed a bond issue to fund a variety of school construction, parents from Wilson Elementary School had to raise their own funds for a playground.
Bev Bafus of Deary, Idaho, is part of the public, too. She does still have kids in the public schools and she’s worried about the quality and the safety of the structure that will house them in high school.
Bafus is a former member of Idaho’s Whitepine School District, which includes Deary, Troy, Bovill and Elk River.
The high school in Troy is so dilapidated that Superintendent Harold Ott is resigning, rather than have a tragedy on his conscience.
A bond issue to construct a new consolidated high school in the district got good support from Troy voters — enough to meet Idaho’s demanding 66.7 percent supermajority for passage — but the rest of the Whitepine District voted it down. Nearby Deary’s high school was remodeled with a 1992 bond issue.
Without districtwide political support and with no help from the state (the grounds for a pending lawsuit), Troy’s case seems hopeless to Bafus.
“The trustees have basically an emergency situation at Troy and nowhere to turn,” she says.
The Idaho Legislature this year rejected proposals to come up with state funds for school construction and to lower the approval requirement for local bond issues to 60 percent.
In Washington, where the state does pay a share of school construction and the bond-approval requirement already is 60 percent, a proposal to reduce that margin to a simple majority was also defeated by lawmakers.
And the share of construction expenses borne by the state has shrunk from about 50 percent in the past to less than 40 percent today.
That makes Cara Schmidt of Valley, Wash., suspicious. She says Jennifer Belcher, Washington state commissioner of public lands, is too close to environmental organizations and is selling too little timber from common school trust lands, the traditional source of state school construction money.
“There needs to be an audit to see why there are no funds coming from this office,” said Schmidt.
In fact, timber sales do continue to support school construction in Washington but even though they’re now augmented by some general fund money, local districts still have to come up with a greater portion of the expense.
And even when a bond issue is successful, there sometimes still is need to tap local pockets, not through taxes but directly.
In the Wilson Elementary School area on Spokane’s South Hill, parents and other supporters held a spaghetti dinner and auction earlier this month, raising some $10,500 so far for a new playground.
“We’re thrilled,” Wilson parent Martha Arneson said of the fund-raiser.
The play area at Wilson was small even before an annex was added. At present a block of Monroe next to the school is barricaded during school hours to provide a little extra play space.
The annex not only consumed the previous playground, it forced the removal of play equipment that no longer meets code and therefore can’t be reinstalled.
The school district will pay for part of the new playground but the parents and other supporters will have to cover most of it, said Arneson.
She doesn’t necessarily think that’s bad.
“This gives us an opportunity to pick what we want and put it where we want on the playground,” she said. Kids, parents and teachers all have input in that process.
Not all the money came from within the Wilson area. The Parent-Teacher group from Jefferson Elementary School sent $200, inspiring Arneson.
“We’re going to keep our ears open for other schools going through this. We can just all help each other out,” she said. “It’s wonderful the way this community pulls together.”
Another parent who worked on the Wilson fund-raiser raises a cautionary note, however.
Tracee Wolff, who since has moved to Bainbridge Island, wonders if another school in a lower socioeconomic area would have been able to provide for its youngsters as adequately.
“It would be really unfortunate if this situation came up with a school that didn’t have those deep pockets,” she said.
Retiree O’Keefe, meanwhile thinks the situation might be averted for all if school officials prioritized their funds differently.
For now he’d like to see the district permanently acquire the block of Monroe between 25th and 26th Avenues and turn it into a playground extension.
What would that cost, he asks — $1.5 million? $2 million?
“That’s a lot of money, but in the big picture, it isn’t a lot of money,” said O’Keefe.
“I’m so interested in education. That’s the whole future of the country.”
NEXT MONTH’S BAGPIPES: THE EFFECTS OF WELFARE REFORM Bagpipes is a monthly feature of the Perspective Page in which readers are invited to share their ideas about a current issue. April’s topic will be welfare reform. Both Idaho and Washington have reported sharp declines in public assistance rolls since welfare-to-work policies went into effect. Both states have seen savings in their budgets. But critics of the reform movement say lower welfare rolls don’t mean poverty has been reduced. In Washington state, studies intended to measure reform’s impact on needy families have produced conflicting reports, depending on who conducted them. What are your thoughts about poverty and welfare reform? Are current policies working? What, if any, changes are needed? Readers’ responses will be reported in Bagpipes on Sunday, April 25. To take part in the conversation, submit your comments, accompanied by name, address and telephone number, using any of the methods listed below: By mail to: Doug Floyd, Interactive editor The Spokesman-Review 999 W. Riverside Ave. Spokane, WA 99201 Phone: 456-5466 (Spokane area) or 1-800-789-0029, ext. 5466. Fax: 509-459-5098. e-mail: dougf@spokesman.com