In the last post I griped about the short life of News Tribune stories on their website. I didn’t write about the coverage of the last school board meeting on Jan 13th. Now I can’t find the Trib’s story on the web.
As per usual only one issue was covered and on this occasion it had to do with our spending the rest of the Red Plan’s money – about five million dollars. We chose to spend it on remaining building projects that were among the lower priorities. Two of us dissented also as per usual.
About $1.9 million of these dollars were to be taken out of the General Fund. Bill Hanson maintained they were not operational funds but considering all the liberties taken with General Fund monies over the course of the Red Plan I have my doubts about this claim.
The folks wishing to keep all this money in capital projects made some strong arguments for these being student friendly expenditures. Nonetheless, with our crowded classes I wasn’t persuaded.
One of the expenses will be for the building of 200 new lockers at East High so kids won’t have to share. Of course, this could be a very short lived benefit. We know that Edison is likely to have a new high school built in two years. Once they build it it will siphon roughly 150 kids out of ISD 709 for four straight years for a total of 600 students. East is likely to have a locker surplus in a few short years. I wish we had more time to consider where we were spending the nearly two million dollars being taken out of the General fund. Its twenty teacher’s worth of spending over one year.
Itt was worth more of a discussion than we had.
