Task force set to issue survey
Ontario citizen’s group will seek input from residents on future school needs
By William Lundquist
Argus Observer
Sunday, December 23, 2007 12:52 AM PST
Ontario - A new survey sponsored by the Ontario Schools Facilities Task Force will seek to find out what Ontario residents want to see in their school system and how much they are willing to pay to make it happen.
David Cox, one of the three co-chairs of the task force, and Michele Grimaldo, the chair of the task force’s communications committee, told the Argus Observer Friday they will take an entirely different approach to try to convince Ontario residents it is in their own best interests to improve school facilities.
Cox said the community had not passed a school bond for 30 years. He and Grimaldo agreed the last bond attempt was a complete disaster because it gave voters only one option — building a new high school in a new location — and the district had already purchased the land for that plan.
The task force is not part of the school district, Cox said, but an independent group of citizens from all walks of life in Ontario.
“It’s worth investing in making our kids more productive members of the community,” he said.
Cox said he is a retired education professor. He said co-chair Ken Hart is an accountant for Gentry Ford and co-chair Ralph Poole is a businessman who owns Poole Oil. Grimaldo said she works in insurance and retirement services. The rest of the task force is just as diverse, Cox said.
While the task force members each have their own ideas about school facilities, he said, the survey is based largely on suggested questions from the community, and those questions do not indicate any bias on the part of the task force.
For example, he said, one question will ask citizens how they would feel about closing Pioneer Elementary School. He said that does not mean the task force, or even any member of it, wants to close the elementary. He said it was just one suggestion for a survey that will try to look at all angles.
By asking community members what they value, Cox said, the task force hopes to identify improvements residents will support. Task force members also hope to use the survey to generate new ideas for facilities and ways to fund them.
The survey also will ask how the community would like to split the grades between the high school, middle school and elementary schools. It asks specifically about vocational, academic and technology programs at the high school. Finally, the survey will ask residents how many dollars per $1,000 in assessed value they would be willing to pay to improve their schools. None is one of the options.
Cox said he has first hand experience with the insufficient facilities at Ontario High School because his two daughters are students there. One of his children, he said, is good at math and science, but biology class dissections have to be done on the small desktops of student desks because there are almost no labs in the school. When that daughter goes out for track, he said, she must run on a track so cracked and worn it is dangerous.
The other daughter, Cox said, is more artistic and loves performing in plays, but the high school does not have a drama department and only just restarted its drama club. The school lost its auditorium when it was converted into a cafeteria, he said. Cox said he sometimes drives his daughter all the way to Boise to participate in plays.
He wants to see more vocational education at the high school, he said, because two thirds of its students do not go to college, yet they are also not prepared for the needed and lucrative jobs that exist right here. He said one of the high school’s most successful vocational programs was in automobile repair. However, the facility for automobile repair eventually lost half its space to classrooms.
“People are being asked to upgrade their school system,” Cox said, “But you can’t ask the community to support something that doesn’t offer a range of skills and knowledge, and that includes vocational education.”
He said task force members recently attended an excellent conference in Sun River where people who have faced similar challenges passing school bonds advised them to go out into the community to learn what it wants.
Those who achieved success with bond attempts told task force members to think outside the box and not get trapped in traditional thinking, especially when it comes to funding.
Cox said the task force finance committee member Doug Dean has been “beating the bushes” to reduce the cost of any bond with grants and other types of alternative funding. Cox said he does not know what kind of bond the task force will recommend, but knows it will not be for $30 million. Funding may be asked for, he said, in smaller chunks specifically targeted at certain needs or schools, though all of the schools are in desperate need right now. Cox said the Ontario School District Facilities Assessment completed in May by the DLR Group Architecture and Planning identified specific needs in each school that total $22 million for the entire district. That amount of money, he said, would just bring the schools up to the point where they are safe and warm.
Safety, he said, is a top priority of the task force. He said the middle school is separated into several buildings with traffic running through them at the beginning and end of the school day.
“It’s downright dangerous,” he said.
The schools did not just arrive at that sorry state out of neglect, Cox said. The buildings are getting very old, and the state funding mechanism does not provide money for major repairs or upgrades for modern technology, he said. That is what bonds are for, he said, and Ontario does not pass them. But Ontario is not alone, Cox said. During the last election, he said, not one bond passed in rural Oregon. Urban areas are having trouble funding facilities projects too, he said. He hopes the legislature will soon act to help.
Grimaldo said what comes out of the task force will be a 20-year plan, not a quick fix. Since needs will probably change again in five years, she said, the plan will really be more of a road map of where the community wants the district to go with its facilities. Grimaldo also wants the 20-year vision to be more open and transparent about planned maintenance projects.
“The maintenance guys do a lot with what they have,” she said. “We’re not talking about keeping up with the Jones’s. We’re talking about Ontario, keeping our students here and giving them an excellent education.”
