School district faces tough choices

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Editor's note: The following is the fourth in a series of articles regarding future growth and development involving Elmore County and the city of Mountain Home.

The roofs at four schools in Mountain Home leak each time it rains.

Textbooks at some schools exceeded their expected lifespan five years ago.

School buses are packed to capacity after the state slashed the district's transportation budget.

Computers in each classroom continue to wear out or break with no money to buy any more this year.

Officials with the Mountain Home School District don't see things starting to improve anytime soon. These are just some of the challenges facing district officials as they find ways to teach a shrinking number of students.

Despite overcrowding at some schools, student enrollment across the district remains on a downward nine-year spiral, said school superintendent Tim McMurtrey. In 2001, the district reached a peak population of nearly 5,400 children. Today, it's down to less than 3,900.

McMurtrey attributes much of that decline to mission changes at Mountain Home Air Force Base. A nearly 60 percent drop in registered students at the base since 2001 forced the district to shut down two of its three on-base facilities with its middle school students now bused to town.

Fewer students on base also had a "huge impact" on the district's annual budget, said assistant superintendent James Gilbert. Each year, the district receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal impact aid reimbursement, which compensates the district for families that live on base and don't pay property taxes to the district.

At one point, that amounted to about $3 million, or about 15 percent of the district's annual revenue.

Meanwhile, state legislatures continued to cut school budgets across Idaho, that included a 10 percent across-the-board cut to student transportation. During the last school year, these cuts had the district looking at cancelling nearly all extracurricular programs, slashing office administrators at each school and cutting teacher salaries by 10 percent.

A $2.8 million levy passed by voters last May helped avert what district officials called a "major finding crisis" but still forced them to chop $1 million from its budget for this year. For now, district officials rely on priority lists to put what's left of their yearly budget to focus on teaching students.

It hasn't been easy, McMurtrey said.

West Elementary School, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, represents the district's biggest priority with urgent attention needed to patch the holes in the roof.

"When it rains, they've got buckets in the hallway," McMurtrey said.

The school superintendent hopes to fix the roof at West, but the $2.5 million price tag keeps that project on hold.

The district also needs to overhaul the roof at the high school and Hacker Middle School. At the same time, trusses in the roof at the high school gym show signs of deterioration with the roof at the middle school gym "on its last legs," McMurtrey said.

For now, the district managed to fix the major holes in the senior hallway roof at the high school, but it still leaks in places, Gilbert added.

"You're trying to patch the holes as fast as you can, but the flat roofs (at some schools) are just wearing out," McMurtrey said. "The buildings are at an age where they're just wearing out."

It's a consequence of dealing with buildings averaging 50 years old with each dealing with their fair share of wear and tear.

"Things just wear out," McMurtrey said.

In addition to building repairs, the district needs to replace thousands of textbooks, especially at the high school and junior high school, Gilbert said. While the state saw this "train wreck coming," it cut the funding to buy them, he added.

Teachers in Mountain Home currently use math books purchased in 2001, foreign language books from 2000 and literature books nearly 13 years old.

Under ideal circumstances, textbooks normally last five or six years, McMurtrey said.

"They're using gorilla glue to bind books at the junior high school," he added. "We are so far out of the adoption cycle for the state. We need new math books desperately."

The district does what it can to keep the existing books in usable condition, but each subsequent year puts even more wear and tear on them.

"The teachers are the real troopers," McMurtrey said. "They figured out a way to work with those old textbooks."

Despite the gloomy outlook, the district saw some glimmer of hope in recent months when the state received millions of dollars in federal stimulus money for education. It allowed the local school district to reinstate some of the furlough days it originally cut and rehired some faculty.

While the federal legislation required the state to restore education funding back to 2008 and 2009 levels, McMurtrey doesn't see a windfall coming this way.

"(We're) going to be lucky to be funded at the level we were this year, if not less," he said. "There's a little glimmer of hope out there, but it's slowly fading."

For now, McMurtrey and Gilbert hope to see more families return to both Mountain Home and the Air Force base to push student enrollment numbers back to where they were in 2001.

"We're getting a little bit of growth in town, but it's not enough to really spark any significant student population change," Gilbert said.

For now, the school district continues to keep its eye on plans introduced by developers to build two planned communities on the western border of Elmore County. If approved by county commissioners, they would triple the county's population over a 30-year period.

Even with the possibility of a massive surge in student enrollment in coming years, the school district still has its hands tied in terms of building new schools, expanding existing facilities or hiring more teachers.

"I can't do anything until I have the students," McMurtrey said.

He used the new Singapore training squadron at the base to illustrate his point. Initial estimates indicated that the district would have another 250 children in its schools once the squadron activated. Some people urged the district to reopen the schools on base to accommodate this crush of children.

But instead of the expected 250 children, the district only saw 20 more students.

The same holds true with the two Mayfield Springs projects, Gilbert said. The district can't consider building a new school in either of the planned communities until the houses are built, families move to this area and children enroll in school.

"It's very reactive," he added. However, it keeps the district from building too many facilities or hiring too many people without the necessary justification.

Looking to the future, the school superintendent remains optimistic that more students will again flock to schools in the Mountain Home School District, regardless if this growth happens in the Mayfield area or elsewhere in Elmore County.

"The reality is for the majority of people living in this community, growth is good for them," McMurtrey said. "For a school district, any growth versus a decline is a good thing."

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  • Maybe Mountain Home should allow progress instead of holding to it's small town roots. There is nothing wrong with progress.

    -- Posted by jrhkuna on Fri, Jan 7, 2011, at 6:33 PM
  • What would you do with growth of the student body if the schools are currently pretty full (which I got from reading school board minutes). By the time you got the benefit from the increase in the tax base, you'ld have a mess on your hands. For goodness sakes rebuild with a pitched roof somehow. A new roof would would lower energy costs, reduce maintenance costs, create jobs, free up employees to do their normal jobs which betters school performance, and allow the student to focus on studying more. I don't live there, but we are considering moving there. Our high school here had the same problem. They used a hotel tax to fund the remodel (it was more than just the roof). People may had some poor strategic planning in the past that has strapped the school board, but deal with it and fix what you have before you look at building new stuff.

    -- Posted by bmlock on Sat, Jan 8, 2011, at 4:00 PM
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