Friday, February 3, 2012

A Rushed Referendum Is Not Best for Beloit


Our school district only began discussing the possibility of a referendum last fall. A well-planned, successful referendum takes years, not a couple of months. At the root of the rush to go to referendum is the fact that our property taxes are scheduled to go down next year when the high school debt is paid off. The school district believes we will be more likely to vote for a referendum now than we would be after seeing some relief on our property tax bill next year. So, we have a poorly planned referendum that leaves too many questions unanswered as we consider how to vote -- the most important being the question of the location of the new school.

2 comments:

  1. The greater the funding, the longer it takes to pay for the mistake.

    The more important the objective, the more difficult it is to correct the error.

    The more people affected, the greater the chances of an oversight.

    The faster the conclusion, the less chance that the best possible solution has been reached.

    It is not always necessary to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes we just have to remember where we left it.

    It is not always necessary to reinvent education. Sometimes we just have to remember what it looked like the last time it worked.

    The people that make the long-term decisions, are rarely there for the long term. New people are elected, and current administrators seem to move on long before their programs reach maturity.

    We should rarely make commitments that will reach well beyond our tenure, and never without researching all of the possibilities.

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  2. Rushed, heck, this referendum was pushed from zero up to seventy million dollars at "light speed"

    It went from some discussions of "school building repairs" at the first "informational meeting" to tearing down schools and building new schools in just a few weeks. I didn't hear one person at the "informational meetings" request anything like the school superintendent is now pushing.

    Even the repairs that were first brought up, would not have added up to the dollars that they were asking for at that time. Surveys had not been done on roof repairs, and quotes had not been sought. There were no hard numbers, only inadequate generalities with almost no specifics.

    This whole thing is fishy, and needs to be voted down.

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