Another try
School district facilities Task Force ready to place another bond
before voters in 2010

BY JESSICA KELLER
ARGUS OBSERVER
Sunday, August 30, 2009 1:14 AM PDT

JESSICA KELLER | ARGUS OBSERVER Ontario High School science teacher Christina Turner reviews a science lab scavenger hunt worksheet in her honors chemistry class Friday afternoon. Turner said the passage of a school bond should take care of most of the needs of the science department at the high school.

ONTARIO—Ontario science teacher Christina Turner said she would like to have more space in her classroom/lab, especially when teaching such a large group of students as in her honors chemistry class.

For Turner it’s easier for half of her class to complete a lab assignment while the other half of her class works on a different assignment they can complete at their desks because, if they are all working in the lab half of her classroom, “it just gets too chaotic.”

Across the hall, Rod Williams, who teaches physics, astronomy and integrated science, would like to have a classroom that at least has capabilities of creating fire using natural gas for his demonstrations rather than having to use Turner’s classroom during her prep periods. Otherwise, he said, he makes do with alcohol-burning fires, which burn at a lot cooler of a temperature and don’t work for all demonstrations — and he does a lot of descriptive story-telling.

“We learn the concepts and try to be creative to achieve our goals, but I have one sink, so we line up to get water,” he said.

A new science wing with updated safety equipment and more space for classroom teaching and lab work with more features found in other science labs would work wonders to solve their problems, Williams and Turner agreed.

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It could yet become a reality.

The 8-C Facilities Task Force will formally recommend to the Ontario School Board in early 2010 it go out for another $18.5 million district-wide capital construction and improvement bond mirroring the one that failed by a small margin in November of last year. Already the task force is planning its next promotion campaign.

“Originally we were kind of looking toward November, and we decided that the economy still wasn’t as stable as we’d like it to be,” task force member Ben Peterson said.

Peterson said, hopefully, by May the economic situation will have improved further, but the school district really needs a bond passed regardless.

“We’re pretty resolved that the situation within the school buildings hasn’t changed,” Peterson said.

The proposed $18.5 million bond will provide for new science classrooms at the high school; constructing a new building at Ontario Middle School to accommodate up to 500 students plus offices and renovate an existing middle school building to handle up to 250 students; update existing school systems and facilities at each of the schools; make site improvements; and pay bond issuance costs.

The bond, however, won’t change much from the previous one, and all the plans for the schools will remain the same. The economy was the No. 1 reason why people didn’t vote for the previous school bond, according to a survey taken following the November election, and Peterson said virtually nobody indicated they had any problems with the plan itself or the need.

The $18.5 million price tag will also likely remain the same, although members are still pondering if there are ways to cut down the price tag. Peterson said, the DLR engineering group that identified what needed to be done at the different schools indicated there were more than $20 million worth of just “warm, safe and dry” improvements that needed to be made at each of the schools, and the amount of money for the current plan doesn’t even cover the cost estimates of making all the schools minimally adequate.

“So we’re really hesitant to ask for anything less than we were before,” Peterson said.

Jessica Keller is the News Editor of the Argus Observer. She can be

contacted at

JessicaK@argusobserver.com