In crafting its 2012 Building Excellent Schools Today grant proposal, the Re-1 administration and board must design a plan that will be convincing both to the granting agency and to local voters, who will have to approve matching funds.
That means a smaller request than last years, with clear justification for the districts priorities.
The grant application is a hard sell, although as Southwest Open School learned last year, the grantor may be more amenable than the voters.
Its fair to ask taxpayers to accept responsibility for providing school environments that do not threaten students safety or impede their learning experiences. Luxury is not required, just safety, reasonable comfort and flexibility to utilize the next several generations of technology.
Its also fair to say that the district has a related responsibility to seek outside resources, like the BEST grant, that will help minimize the financial burden on local taxpayers. Justification for reapplying is ample.
Re-1 faces serious challenges, and the district has not always done a good job of explaining why those challenges seem intractable. The Voters want to know how their dollars will purchase better education for local students, and why each current request (generally different from the last one) is now considered to be the best way of utilizing scarce resources.
Successive predictions of dire consequences, which the district has somehow managed to forestall after voters have refused to pony up, have muted any sense of urgency, no matter how real. Re-1s huge BEST request in 2011 was very poor strategy. The district must learn from that experience, but the takeaway lesson cannot be that better-targeted efforts are fruitless.
Buildings do not last forever, especially when funds for maintenance and improvements are so limited. The demands on facilities have changed, as have population demographics. Hard, hard choices are ahead, and they cannot be influenced most by those who shout the loudest. History and tradition are important considerations, but they cannot be drags on forward progress.
Re-1 needs to give this BEST grant its very best shot, while also giving its full support to the SWOS reapplication. Although this is a terrible time to be asking voters for anything, district leaders must believe that their constituents do care about education and will step up to provide funding when they are persuaded their investment will be a good one.
Is that true? The bar is (and should be) high, but to suggest that voters will just say no without seriously considering the request is a very sad comment on the local populace. Re-1 needs to find a way to demonstrate that it can nurture educational excellence and that funding does matter.
If, at first, you dont succeed, refine the next attempt. Local citizens and the officials who represent them cannot back away from high standards for education.
