District 21 is seeking grants to do a long-range facilities plan and facilities assessment, and also plans to seek a $4-million matching grant from the state when it again asks voters to fund new schools.
North Wasco County School District 21 Superintendent Candy Armstrong told the school board Thursday, Dec. 13, that likely the soonest the district could expect to go before voters again was fall of 2020.
The district has already hired someone to start the facilities assessment. The grant that would fund it could be used to retroactively pay architect Richard Higgins, who is certified to do such assessments and has already worked with the district on facilities planning.
The planning grants will be applied for in mid-January, when the application period opens.
The school district’s request to voters for a $235-million-bond authority to build four new schools was soundly defeated in November, with a nearly 60 percent no vote.
Armstrong said each precinct across the district voted at the same 60/40 split. “Our proposal just did not resonate with 60 percent, across the board,” she said. “You’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Critics of the bond faulted the district for not having an adequate long-range facilities plan and for not seeking the $4 million grant from the state. This would address both of those complaints.
They also faulted the district for not listening to voters. The district’s first step after the election was to hold a listening session.
Following the goal of listening more to the district, and to a wider cross-section of its members, Armstrong said she attended a meeting of Spanish speaking parents, facilitated by The Next Door, Inc.
She had a translator, as the meeting was conducted in Spanish, and heard from parents that they had a keen interest in being more involved; at least one person expressed an interest in being on the school board.
They are also interested in having Armstrong, other administrators and teachers come and interact with them, she said.
“Again, the purpose of it is to listen,” she said, and to reach out to people “whose voices we have not heard.”
Former D21 board member Carol Roderick told the board that as a district patron, she felt the board was “a little detached from the average person.”
She said in her neighborhood of low-income residents, she estimated just six of probably 150 people voted for the bond. She thought they had no idea what they were voting for or not voting for, and “nobody told them.”
She said The Dalles is a high-poverty town with lots of single parents, and the people on the facilities planning sessions last year were not like the makeup of much of the rest of the town.
She said her low-income neighbors have opinions and “should have been on that committee too.”
The committee meetings were open to anyone in the public to join.
She said she felt the district lost track of thinking about the kids first, and she advocated for building an early learning center. That idea was preferred by all three elementary school principals in facilities planning sessions in 2017.
“This is a community that needs help. It needs help with a lot of things and raising our children is one,” Roderick said. Building “a fancy sports center and a fancy new high school are not going to do it.”
She said if people wanted nice sports fields, they could raise funds and build them themselves, which is what residents did 30 or 40 years ago.
Armstrong laid out other steps she suggested the board could take as part of its effort to listen to more voices in the district. She suggested three public meetings in the spring, one per month, and gathering feedback from as many people as possible on what they’re thinking.
From there, it would be a longer process of determining what the board wants to seek in a future bond, she said.
She’d like the school board to start having monthly work sessions to look at the issue. She also said she is retiring after the next school year. She said the board needs to budget for the cost of a superintendent search.
Armstrong said the soonest the district could apply for the $4 million state facilities grant would be the fall of 2019. “I don’t think we’ll have the amount of work done to do that.”
By the time the work is done to know what to put on the ballot, it will probably be fall 2020, she said.
She said the district has to be very specific about what it puts on the ballot in order to qualify for the $4 million grant.
She added that the good part of waiting until fall 2020 for a possible new bond was that the bonds to pay off the middle school will be finished by then.
“The last payment for this middle school is next tax season, so when you go out in 2020, you’ll have a clean slate across the district.”
Because former District 12 taxpayers still have one more year to pay on the middle school, it caused confusion over what the taxing rate for the $235 million bond would be.
Some wrongly believed that one part of town would be paying more than another, but the bonds would have cost the same for every taxpayer across the district. The school board estimated it would have been no more than $2.99 per $1,000 assessed property value.
Taxpayers in the former D-12 were already paying about $1.65 per $1,000 for the middle school, so the net increase in their taxes, with the new bond added, would have been another $1.35, for the total of $2.99 per $1,000.
Former District 9 residents, who had no middle school debt, would have gone from no debt payments to the $2.99 per $1,000 for the new bond.
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