Time to set aside politics
Kelly Everitt

Cooler heads prevailed in school levy's passage

Posted Wednesday, September 2, 2015, at 10:23 AM
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  • I am glad you are pleased. Guess we'll see where we are in 5 years when this one expires and there stands the MHSD with their hands out yet again!

    -- Posted by joe_smoe on Wed, Sep 2, 2015, at 1:43 PM
  • They had the previous Maintenance levy and was the roof replaced ? NO.

    You are pleased that it passed, well if the levy vote is not concurrent with another vote, lets say November elections the turnout will be low. The school district knew this, its employees/family probably made up 90 percent of the yes vote.

    The one line that stood out was: We can use this money for any reason we deem to be for safety or security. NOT JUST MAINTENANCE!

    -- Posted by gmoney on Wed, Sep 2, 2015, at 4:27 PM
  • A overwhelming and clear message was sent to our community leaders and elected officials that public education is a PRIORITY and that the vast majority of our community will do what it takes to better the quality of education for the children of Mountain Home.

    Thank you to all of those who voted YES, the child of this community thank you from the bottom of their hearts.

    There is nothing more rewarding then to see children in a clean, updated and healthy learning environment...

    Thank you Mountain Home...you made the right choice!

    -- Posted by DUMBFOUNDED IN IDAHO on Thu, Sep 3, 2015, at 8:14 AM
  • Once again, there is NEGATIVITY with those in this community like "gmoney"..A distrust or paranoia that infest some in this community who think ANY public or government institution are "socialist, or communist" with a hidden agenda to take ALL of your money...or even better...the school district has a "secret covert" operation to deplete those within this community of funds to procure salaries of school employees so they can go on hidden tropical hideaways, having cocktails on the beach and toasting their success in swindling the taxpayers of Mtn Home out of their hard earned salaries...

    Give me a BREAK!!! Get a life...

    -- Posted by DUMBFOUNDED IN IDAHO on Thu, Sep 3, 2015, at 8:35 AM
  • Cooler heads will prevail LITERALLY if they don't fix the roof right this time.

    Cold water from rain, snow and ice will be dripping down on our kids heads once again!

    Replace not repair the roof. You now have enough money. Do it right!

    AaO

    -- Posted by Alwaysanoptimist on Thu, Sep 3, 2015, at 10:56 PM
  • I agree with Brian, many people want the government out of their lives, and pay no taxes. I think these people are extremely jaded if they think that big business is going to come in and fix our infrastructure and offer the same level of education as can be read in this Forbes article:

    "Forbes notes: "The charter school movement began as a grassroots attempt to improve public education. It's quickly becoming a backdoor for corporate profit." A McKinsey report estimates that education can be a $1.1 trillion business in the United States. Meanwhile, state educational funding continues to be cut, and budget imbalances are worsened by the transfer of public tax money to charter schools.

    Education funding continues to be cut largely because corporations aren't paying their state taxes.

    So philanthropists like Bill Gates and Eli Broad and Michael Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch and Jeff Bezos and the Walton family, who have little educational experience among them, and who have little accountability to the public, are riding the free-market wave and promoting "education reform" with lots of standardized testing.

    ----Just Like the Fast-Food Industry: Profits for CEOs, Low Wages for the Servers

    Our nation's impulsive experiment with privatization is causing our schools to look more like boardrooms than classrooms. Charter administrators make a lot more money than their public school counterparts, and their numbers are rapidly increasing. Teachers, on the other hand, are paid less, and they have fewer years of experience and a higher turnover rate. The patriotic-sounding "Teach for America" charges public school districts $3,000 to $5,000 per instructor per year. Teachers don't get that money, business owners do.

    ----Good Business Strategy: Cut Employees, Use Machines to Teach

    The profit motive also leads to shortcuts in the educational methods practiced on our children. Like "virtual" instruction. The video-game-named Rocketship Schools have $15/hour instructors monitoring up to 130 kids at a timeas they work on computers. In Wisconsin, half the students in virtual settings are attending schools that are not meeting performance expectations. Only one out of twelve "cyber schools" met state standards in Pennsylvania. In Los Angelespublic money goes for computers instead of needed infrastructure repair.

    K12 Inc., the largest online, for-profit Educational Management Organization in the U.S., is a good example of what theCenter for Media and Democracy calls "America's Highest Paid Government Workers" -- that is, the CEOs of corporations that make billions by taking control of public services. While over 86 percent of K12's profits came from taxpayers, and while the salaries of K12's eight executives went from $10 million to over $21 million in one year, only 27.7 percent of K12 Inc. online schools met state standards in 2010-2011, compared to 52 percent of public schools.

    It gets worse with the Common Core Standards, an unproven Gates-funded initiative that requires computers many schools don't have. The Silicon Valley Business Journal reports that "Next year, K-12 schools across the United States will begin implementing Common Core State Standards, an education initiative that will drive schools to adopt technology in the classroom as never before...Apple, Google, Cisco and a swarm of startups are elbowing in to secure market share." States are being hit with unexpected new costs, partly for curriculum changes, but also for technology upgrades, testing, and assessment.

    ----Banker's Ethics in the Principal's Office

    Finally, the profit motive leads to questionable ethics among school operators, if not outright fraud. After a Los Angeles charter school manager misused funds, the California Charter Schools Association insisted that charter schools areexempt from criminal laws because they are private. The same argument was used in a Chicago case. Charters employ the privatization defense to justify their generous salaries while demanding instructional space as public entities. States around the country are being attracted to the money, as, for example, in Texas and Ohio, where charter-affiliated campaign contributions have led to increased funding and licenses for charter schools."

    -- Posted by idahogeek52 on Fri, Sep 4, 2015, at 6:33 AM
  • Did anyone else notice the cost of the bid they accepted? On September second the board accepted the bid from J.B.'s Roofing, Inc., in the amount of $599,998. As much as this levy was made out to be doom and gloom about the failing roof, the cost to actually repair the roof is just under 12% of the 5 million they will receive.

    -- Posted by EE on Wed, Sep 30, 2015, at 3:43 PM
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