The failed school bond proposal was a topic of conversation at the Greene County board of education’s open forum Sept. 14, the day following the election.
Board members at the open forum were Mark Peters, David Ohrt and Mike Dennhardt. By design, a quorum of the board is not present, no action is taken, and there is no agenda. Instead, it’s a time for dialog with members of the public.
Elementary principal Scott Johnson kicked off the conversation with a thank you to the volunteer Pay It Forward committee. “It wasn’t a winning vote, but if you look where we started, 39 percent (the vote on a similar proposal a year ago) to almost 54 percent is a great victory, raising the vote by 14 percent in that short a time. You should be proud of what you did,” Johnson said.
Pay It Forward committee member Wendy Vander Linden was at the meeting. She said the committee was pleased to see an increase in voter turnout – 38.5 percent, up from 28.6 percent in 2015. “I think we’re headed in a really positive direction,” she said. “The majority did say ‘yes.’ It just wasn’t a big enough majority.”
Peters said the board will digest voter demographics and reasons for their votes, and gather input from as many people as they can. “We’ll take feedback from everybody out there on ‘where do we go?’ It’s not just a seven-member board discussion. We’ll take input and then sit and hash it out among the seven of us and formulate another plan,” Peters said.
Mark Vander Linden, also a member of the Pay It Forward committee, said the challenge is to find a plan to realize some of the operational savings that would have been realized with the proposed construction. He said that he had spent the late hours of Tuesday thinking of possible scenarios. “We stand to gain some operational savings if we can find some creative ways to divest of a century-old building,” he said.
Peters said the board would welcome ideas from the public and asked for the media’s help in getting that information out. “I’ve said all along, I’ll talk to anybody, anytime,” he said. Contact information for board members is posted on the school district website.
According to board secretary Brenda Muir, there were five special school elections on bond issues Sept. 13. Two passed. Of the failed proposals, it was the second or third time on the ballot for two of them.
Other conversation at the board’s forum centered on homecoming schedules for Greene County and Paton-Churdan. The matter was referred back to the administrative level.
