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- Educate the community about school funding
School funding is a complex mixture of economics and
politics, but the basic message is simple. If we
allow our community leaders to permit family housing to be constructed
faster than they develop commercial enterprises in our community, more and
more of the cost of running our schools will transfer to homeowners. Instead
of paying a third of the cost of operating our schools, we homeowners will
end up paying 100% of the cost of educating new students.
I believe that once people understand this simple dynamic, the rest of the
job is easy.
- Improve Communications
We are taught that there are three primary classifications for the ability
to see through a substance. Opaque means light doesn't pass through
at all. A substance is transparent if you can see clearly through it,
with little distortion. In between is translucency, in which the
light gets through, but you can't see what's on the other side very clearly.
I rate our district's communications on financial matters to be translucent.
The information is there if you have the training to wade through the
published financial reports, and the persistence to ask for additional
information to fill in the blanks.
I believe we can do much better, and that it needs to be treated like a
mass-market, consumer education effort. By that I mean the message should be
clear and as simple as possible. It must be communicated via the channel
that reaches the most people, and the message needs to be repeated over and
over to increase the chances that it will be read and understood.
Look at the effort McDonald's makes to advertise their Big Mac. Is there
really anyone in America who doesn't know what a Big Mac is?
Nonetheless, McD's knows that if they stop advertising, people will quit
thinking about Big Macs, and sales will fall off.
Likewise, we should tell the basic story of school economics over and over
via the all the communications channels available to us.
- Demand a Voice in Community Planning and
Management
Housing developments have cropped up all over our District
because the officials of the cities of Hilliard, Dublin and Columbus take a
friendly, even facilitating stance toward developers, even when it
brings
harm to the community.
I think the School Board should yell and scream about this (I certainly have
been). After all, the population of the Hilliard City School District is
75,000, making it a larger political entity than all except Columbus. The
folks who vote for members of the School Board also vote for mayors, council
members, township trustees and county commissioners. Why doesn't the school
board mobilize our community to demand that these other elected officials
make the health of the school system one of their highest priorities. After,
it's one of OUR highest priorities.
We now have the Big Darby Accord playing a large role in the future of our
school district. Only half the land within the district boundaries has been
developed, and the use of most of the remaining land may well be determined
by the Big Darby Accord members. Our school district, as well as
Southwestern City Schools, should have a seat at the table, especially at
the meetings of "The Electeds" - officials who hold elected offices.
Why shouldn't that include the elected members of the School Board? As
said before, the school district is a larger entity, in terms of constituency and
budget, than all parties other than the City of Columbus and Franklin
County.
- Develop a Long-Range Strategy for Growth
We should not have to go through another fiasco like the one associated
with building our third high school. First, with the endorsement of
officials of the City of Hilliard, our School Board bought 122 acres
on Cosgray Rd for the third high school. Then there was a great outcry about
the impact of putting that much traffic so close to the other two high
schools. Mayor Schonhardt then declared that putting the high school on
Cosgray Rd was now a bad idea, and that
Davis
Rd (on the land of developer Dan O'Brien) would be a better choice.
That
never happened. Finally
the School Board selected and purchased a piece of land on Walker Rd (read
more), and in
May 2006, after several tries, the bond levy was passed to build Bradley
High School. Now the District must dispose of the Cosgray Rd property, and
in today's depressed real estate market, is likely to take a bath.
Meanwhile, our high school kids had to suffer with buildings that were over
capacity by 20%, until Bradley came online in 2009.
Most, if not all of this could have been avoided with better planning and
better communications.
- Campaign for the Creation of Impact Fee Levies
Impact Fees are a kind of tax that is applied to new structures at the
time of construction. The City of Hilliard already imposes impact fees to
help pay the infrastructure costs of new construction. We need the General
Assembly to grant this power to school districts as well.
Instead of the approach we have today where new schools are built by
borrowing money (by selling municipal bonds), with an impact fee system
the money is collected as each house is built. If the amount of the impact fee
is set appropriately, when the population growth reaches the point where a new
school building is needed, the money is already in the bank. We don't have
to hope that the residents will pass yet another bond levy, committing
ourselves to pay principal and interest for year to come. By moving into our
community, new residents automatically agree to fund new schools.
The cool thing about an impact fee is that it taxes people who have yet to
move into the community, not the ones who already live here. However, to
make things fair, these owners of new homes would not have to pay any of the
millage associated with bonds sold in the past. We who already live here pay for the schools
already in existence; the owners of new homes pay only for the schools we have to
build because of them.
Impact fees are a common answer to funding school construction in high
growth areas all over the country. We don't have them here because the
developers and homebuilders think it will make it harder to sell new homes,
and these people carry great weight in our state legislature.
State Representative Larry Wolpert, then our voice in the Ohio House of
Representatives, bravely sponsored
HB299 to create
school district impact fees, but you never heard our School Board or
Administrators say a thing about it, much less lend their support. HB299
died a quiet death.
Why was that?
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