Fate of Buckeye Valley North sealed

DUSTIN ENSINGER

Staff Writer

Buck­eye Val­ley Local School Dis­trict Vot­ers on Tues­day resound­ingly defeated a bal­lot mea­sure that would have even­tu­ally paved the way for the clo­sure of the district’s three community-based ele­men­tary schools and the cre­ation of a so-called mega ele­men­tary school.

The bal­lot mea­sure, which fea­tured a five-year, 0.25 per­cent income tax and a 28-year, $30 mil­lion bond issue, was defeated by a whop­ping 72 to 28 per­cent mar­gin, accord­ing to com­plete but unof­fi­cial results with the Delaware County Board of Elections.

The income tax would have raised about $1.2 mil­lion annu­ally and helped to reduce a bud­get gap that the dis­trict faces going into the 2012–13 school year. The bond issue would have cost vot­ers about $107 per every $100,000 in prop­erty val­u­a­tion and paid for the con­struc­tion of the new ele­men­tary school.

Had the mea­sure passed, it would have allowed Buck­eye Val­ley North Ele­men­tary School to remain open for about three years while a sin­gle, cen­tral­ized ele­men­tary school was con­structed on the district’s cam­pus at Coover Road. How­ever, that would have also resulted in the even­tual clo­sure of the district’s two other ele­men­tary schools, a unpop­u­lar prospect with many of the district’s residents.

Now that the mea­sure has failed, North Ele­men­tary school will not reopen and the district’s 5th grade stu­dents will be moved to the mid­dle school and the dis­trict will oper­ate out of East and West ele­men­tary for stu­dents in grades K-4.

School board mem­ber Tom Kael­ber said the sting­ing defeat should serve as a mes­sage to dis­trict offi­cials that facil­i­ties deci­sions should be made by the com­mu­ni­ties those schools serve.

“My fel­low board mem­bers have said that the best way to take a sur­vey is to put the ques­tion on the bal­lot,” Kael­ber told the Gazette. “The ques­tion became do you pre­fer a mega school or com­mu­nity cen­tered ele­men­tary schools? We must value and lis­ten to pub­lic opin­ion. If we don’t we will never get moral and finan­cial sup­port for our schools. Deci­sion mak­ing, espe­cially for facil­i­ties, should be from the bot­tom up, not top down. This can be accom­plished through com­mit­tee work that allows our BV com­mu­nity to feel ownership.”

The com­bined bal­lot mea­sure was defeated in each of the district’s 20 vot­ing precincts, a result that Dave Kessler, a vocal critic of the board and admin­is­tra­tion since the bud­get reduc­tion plans were first unveiled, attrib­uted to poor com­mu­ni­ca­tion and a lack of com­mu­nity input.

“I though it was very poorly thought out. It was very poorly planned,” Kessler said. “It’s time for the board and super­in­ten­dent to reassess the direc­tion of the school district.”

Dan Kinke­laar, a for­mer levy com­mit­tee mem­ber, echoed that sentiment.

“They’re not ask­ing for what they need,” he said. “They are telling us what we should have.”

Kinke­laar said that he hopes that school dis­trict offi­cials will use the elec­toral drub­bing as a poll of the com­mu­nity and back away from the sin­gle ele­men­tary school idea.

“Their com­mu­ni­ties want com­mu­nity schools,” he said.

Another levy com­mit­tee mem­ber, Vic Whit­ney, believes that the district’s focus on a sin­gle ele­men­tary school sealed the bal­lot issue’s fate.

“They went wrong by not allow­ing the vot­ers to speak to the sole issue of whether they want to keep North open,” he said. “This started out as a bud­get sit­u­a­tion and the next thing you know we have this ridicu­lous build a school idea.”

The clo­sure of North Ele­men­tary was orig­i­nally pro­posed to close a pro­jected $1.3 mil­lion bud­get gap head­ing into the 2012–13 school year. Along with elim­i­nat­ing numer­ous teach­ing and clas­si­fied posi­tion, dis­trict offi­cials esti­mated that they could save about $1.6 mil­lion annually.

How­ever, school board mem­bers later adopted an alter­na­tive bud­get reduc­tion plan after many Rad­nor area res­i­dents expressed out­rage that their com­mu­nity school was being tar­geted for closure.

“This was really a way to try to save North and make all the moves at once,” Super­in­ten­dent Jamie Grube said of the com­pro­mise plan.

He blamed the elec­toral drub­bing on the tight win­dow the dis­trict had to run a cam­paign after approv­ing the bal­lot mea­sure in March and the fact that the cam­paign was con­ducted dur­ing the sum­mer when chil­dren are not at school and many fam­i­lies are not as engaged.

“We knew that it was going to be a chal­lenge, but it was worth a shot,” he said.

Despite the district’s finan­cial sit­u­a­tion recently improv­ing, accord­ing to sev­eral sources, due to higher than pro­jected rev­enues, Grube said there are no plans to try and keep North Ele­men­tary open, although he pointed out that such a move would ulti­mately be made by the board.

“We’ve been work­ing on plans for both options, and now we’re really going to have to kick that in gear,” he said.

Board Pres­i­dent Tom Shep­pard said he does not fore­see the board decid­ing to keep North Ele­men­tary open, and does not believe that it would be fis­cally respon­si­ble for the dis­trict to do so.

“There’s not enough money to oper­ate North with­out hav­ing a very neg­a­tive effect on our bal­ance,” he said.

Nor does he believe that the issue of one, cen­tral­ized ele­men­tary school will go away any­time soon.

“I think that there’s both edu­ca­tion and finan­cial rea­son to con­tinue to look at the one ele­men­tary issue,” he said.

The spe­cial elec­tion ended up cost­ing the dis­trict about $35,000. Due to fil­ing dead­lines, the ear­li­est the dis­trict could be back on the bal­lot would be in a Feb­ru­ary spe­cial election.

Posted by Gary Henery on Aug 8 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.