It's time for facts over fear regarding schools

LPOSD persistently cries foul due to state funding cuts, yet LPOSD manages to be rated second, only to the Coeur d’Alene School District within North Idaho. By 2014, Sen. Shawn Keough revealed the Idaho Legislature “approved the best public schools budget since 2008. The budget reverses $35 million in cuts that school districts and local property taxpayers absorbed during the economic downturn of the last decade.” Further, LPOSD has received 7.5-percent increases in state revenue during each of the last two years.

Scapegoating the state for not enough education spending, (50 percent of the state budget) is selfish and unwarranted. LPOSD must shed the fraternal deafness by; restoring public trust of levy weary voters (65 percent), scrutinizing past and a proposed 7.8-percent levy increase and eliminating various “slush fund” accounts. 500,000 reasons, among many others at www.lposdlevy.com are below;

• Insisting on stand-alone LPOSD levy election dates is a monetary burden for Bonner County taxpayers. Greater clarity to actual revenue projections, reduced election cost ($61,000) and reduced supplemental levy expense amounts could be realized for each election not held on March or August election dates.

• Unnecessary and unaffordable construction spending ($55 million) is not an acceptable substitute for the lack of preventative maintenance and/or a deceitful, if not a fraudulent, claim of overwhelming structural disrepair.

• Academic English Language Arts program spending (a down-payment, $200K of $600K) is an unacceptable substitute for LPOSD curriculum implementation lacking uniform testing results. Considering that four of eleven LPOSD schools are excelling under the current ELA program (LPOSD and state testing data), a new program only serves to disguise accountability of the Superintendent’s performance.

• $100,000 (plus) in food, airfare, Broadway shows and lodging) are egregious “extra-curricular” tax-payer expenses.

• Objectionable LPOSD spending, qualifying for a “cut furthest from the classroom” (Woodward), is the LPOSD executive bonus pay. Absent formal “LPOSD policy,” over the past four years $110,000 in bonus payments went to four LPOSD executives. Superintendent Woodward’s; $141,000 salary, $13,500 “performance bonus” and $6,000 “car allowance.” exceeds that of both the Coeur d’Alene and West Ada (Meridian) School District Superintendents, the latter having a student and staff population approximately 10x larger than LPOSD’s.

First, LPOSD should move the March 2017 levy vote to May and constructively evaluate this $17 million levy amount.

Secondly, the “sky is falling” scenario touted before the August 2016 levy was just as false as the recurring “fear-mongering” prior to each supplemental levy about losing teachers, staff, and programs. The latter is unrealistic and becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, only, under continuous systematic and myopic arrogance of fiduciary responsibility.

Thirdly, a creative transition solution for LPOSD levy rejections…, should there be any after serious attention has been paid to reasonable expense reductions and realistic revenue projections, is to ask; PAFE ($3 million), Inland Northwest Community Foundation ($94 million), and/or the Idaho Community Foundation with its $117 million endowments, to philanthropically step up and “only indemnify” from their endowments, enough to cover applicable supplemental levy “teacher salary contracts” only, until a reasonable supplemental levy request is passed, a maximum 0 percent increase.

DAN ROSE

Sandpoint