The Garden City Telegram
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History not kind to big bond issues
Published 10/18/2008 in News : Education
By EMILY BEHLMANN
The Garden City school district hasn't had much luck in putting before voters bond issues to address concerns at Garden City High School.
But in the district's recent history, the high school isn't the only facility in USD 457 that administrators and board members have said is overcrowded, and other bond issues have sought to fix concerns at the elementary, intermediate and middle school levels, too.
Sometimes, residents were satisfied enough with proposals to approve them with strong votes of confidence.
USD 457 will try again Nov. 4 at asking for the public's support of a building project. This time, the $97.5 million bond issue would go toward the Board of Education's long-range facility plan, which would include construction of a $92.5 million high school for 2,000 students (expandable to a 2,500 capacity), conversion of the main GCHS building into a middle school, conversion of Abe Hubert Middle School into an elementary school and expansion of Garfield Elementary School into an early childhood center.
Middle school issues
In developing the latest plan, school staff, a community committee and the board talked a lot about lacking adequate space in the district's facilities, paying special attention to Garden City's 1,900-student high school. The building, school officials say, is built to house comfortably about 1,500, and the student population has exceeded that at least since ninth-graders moved up to the high school in 1991.
Back then, the topic of space shortages was also aired at school board meetings, but at the time, more of the focus was on the middle grades.
Ninth-graders had moved out of Abe Hubert and Kenneth Henderson middle schools, but sixth-graders had moved in, and district officials said the buildings were bursting at the seams. In 1992, Abe Hubert had an enrollment of 775, and Kenneth Henderson 862. Together, they relied on a total of 20 modular classrooms to handle classes that couldn't fit in the main buildings.
A committee proposed the solution of a third middle school, to be placed on Spruce Street near Campus Drive. The bond proposal was for $8.6 million.
Voters defeated the measure by 65 votes in November 1992, leaving then-Superintendent Charlie Hubbard concerned about how the district could accommodate future growth.
"We're crowded now," he said at the time. "We're already in portables, and we'll be in more next year."
Board member Conce Magana said at the time he thought the defeat was the result of a rushed job on the bond issue. People he talked to didn't feel they had enough facts.
So six months later, they tried again, this time to a harder defeat. Fifty-six percent of voters rejected the same proposal.
Leading up to the vote, Telegram letters to the editor particularly criticized the proposed Spruce Street location, with John Clymer writing that the middle school should instead be on the west side of town, near more of the elementary schools. Other mentioned safety concerns of a school just off Campus Drive.
The defeat led board member Dick Standmark to say it was probably time to consider another solution.
Another solution
Regardless of the community's wants, enrollment was still growing, and in 1994, USD 457 had grown to 7,313 students, from a 4,535-student enrollment in 1980. The district projected that USD 457 would have 8,632 students by the end of the millennium. (As it turns out, fall 2000 enrollment was 7,552. It dropped off from there after the December 2000 fire at ConAgra beef processing plant, and this year, it's at 7,241.)
With 33 classrooms in trailers and concerns about needing more, the district moved 110 sixth-graders into the unused Friend School, near the Finney-Scott County line, in the 1993-94 school year while leaders formed a committee to figure out something else.
Teacher representatives still advocated a third middle school, but one unnamed committee member in a Telegram story said proposing that would be "beating a dead horse."
The group instead put forth the idea of building two intermediate centers. Fifth-graders would be pulled from the elementary schools and sixth-graders from the middle schools, alleviating crowding at both levels.
It made sense to then-Superintendent Milt Pippinger.
"You can build a program around that pre-adolescent," he said at the time. "It fits their needs."
Many teachers weren't on board, saying people liked having their children in the "neighborhood" elementary school as long as possible, and that with only two years at a school, students couldn't develop much ownership.
The public, however, liked the plan. A $13.8 million bond issue passed with 61.8 percent of the vote for construction of Bernadine Sitts and Charles O.Stones intermediate centers, plus renovations at Buffalo Jones Elementary School. The new schools opened in 1997.
Other levels
Even with the intermediate centers in place, there were still crowding concerns, especially at GCHS, Alta Brown Elementary School and Florence Wilson Elementary School.
The school district tried putting together a plan that would address all three at once, and put the $30 million bond issue on the November 1998 ballot. It failed by a vote of 4,176-2,206, but with little mention of the elementary schools. Most of the opposition was related to the fact that many said they didn't want to see a second high school in Garden City.
The district succeeded the following November in passing a $6.5 million bond issue for classroom, restroom, gymnasium and parking additions at Alta Brown and Florence Wilson. It got 56.3-percent approval.
But there was still the high school. Committee members still said that a second high school was the way to go.
"Rather than a single mega-school, it is better for education to have smaller schools," Mac Payne, co-chairman of the bond committee, said at the time. "It's very difficult to recruit doctors and nurses because they like the town and lifestyle in Garden City, but they don't want their kids to go to a giant school."
Voters, though, turned down the $33 million proposal in November 2000, with a 4,890-3,479 vote. Leading up to the vote, opponents cited concerns including the cost of the initial project, the expense of operating another school and the effect splitting the high school would have on community unity and athletic competitiveness.
The board considered trying something else -- building a freshmen center -- and planned an $18 million bond issue for that purpose. But three months ahead of the November 2002 election, they pulled the measure off the ballot, citing poor economic conditions and lack of community support.
When selecting the current plan that would keep Garden City a one-high-school community, board members couldn't help but look to the past.
"We have to look at what the community will accept, and I think it's a single high school," board member Jeff Crist said at the time.
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