A lingering issue
School bond effort for Ontario still a priority for officials, committee
By JESSICA KELLER
ARGUS OBSERVER
Thursday, November 5, 2009 11:02 AM PST
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| Ontario Middle School seventh-grade science teacher Zach Knapp reviews an assignment with student Cynthia Velasquez, Wednesday. Knapp is hoping a school bond passes so a science lab can be built at OMS. |
ONTARIO — Ontario Middle School sixth-grade teacher Nicole Macht and seventh-grade teacher Zach Knapp would like an Ontario School District bond to pass for simple reasons.
Macht, who works in the Challenger building, which is one of the oldest on campus, said her classroom has bubbling ceiling tiles from water damage, as do many others in the building.
There are also some holes in her floor from when the former computer lab for keyboarding was converted into a classroom. And instead of being in front of the class teaching a lesson, she often has to stay behind them in the corner where her desk is situated because that’s the only place her technology can be accessed electrically. Macht said her situation is not unique at the middle school, which is why a school bond dedicating some funding to the middle school would be nice and beneficial for students.
“They deserve an environment that’s going to be safe, warm and dry and gives them the best opportunity to be successful in a 21st century world,” she said.
In the Enterprise building, Knapp has other challenges when teaching science, specifically no science lab in which to do the type of activities that engaged him so much when he was a student at OMS. Because of space issues, the science lab had to be converted into classroom space. The equipment, he said, was farmed out to different teachers and shuffled around through the years, which makes labs hard to organize because not all the equipment is accounted for. The types of labs organized also have to be tailored to what is safe and possible to do in the classrooms, but in his, he only has one sink to use for cleanup after dissections and plenty of microscopes but not enough electrical outlets.
Plenty of hurdles have to be overcome before any significant improvements can be made at the middle or other schools in the district, and the greatest is the passage of a school bond itself.
Communication with the public about the school district is a starting point and one Ontario Superintendent Linda Florence has been assiduously working on through a series of powerpoint presentations. While her presentation does not address a school bond, Florence said her presentations are a start in getting people informed, which is key to a successful school bond.
“You really have to have a lot of communication so that everyone gets the same information,” she said.
Meeting with people while sharing that information is also key.
“You don’t want to go to the public without meeting them first,” she said.
Her presentations, which she has taken to the Ontario Chamber of Commerce, Rotary, Ontario City Council, each of the schools in the district and a School Board work session with a presentation scheduled at the Ontario Lion’s Club upcoming, consist of is a “hodge-podge of information” because when she first came to the district she received many different questions about what the school district is doing that she wanted to answer. One segment addresses the “Millennial Generation” — the students in school now and who they are.
“One of the questions I had been asked is ‘What are you going to do about the unruly kids at the middle school?’ ” Florence said, adding that made her wonder what group of student is that because the “Millennial Generation” is much different from generations in the past and much easier to get along with.
The second point in her presentation addresses school district goals because Florence indicated people had questions regarding what the school district was working toward. The third aspect focuses on achievement and specifically Adequate Yearly Progress. The fourth point centers around facilities, highlighting some of the deficiencies within the schools through photos. Florence said one of the main points with the facilities she is trying to get across is the Ontario School District “cannot provide a 21st century education in 1930s schools.”
Florence’s next project will be to create a DVD that provides more detail about the current conditions of the different schools.
“I think, if you can’t bring the public into the schools, and sometimes it’s so hard to bring the public in to tour the schools, I say we take the information to the people, and that’s pretty much what my first presentation now has been doing and what the DVD will do,” she said.
In a different arena, the 8C facilities bond promotion committee is preparing for a possible bond election behind the scenes. 8C facilities bond committee chairman Ben Peterson said the group is doing some preliminary fundraising for a possible bond promotion campaign.
The bond committee has not changed its plans to recommend the School Board go out for a May bond election, Peterson said, but before any major push, the committee intends to a take a survey of Ontario School District residents in December to again gauge their feelings about a bond.
“It would be a brief, to-the-point survey to kind of focus in on whether or not people in the community still think this is a good idea,” Peterson said.
If the survey responses were overwhelmingly opposed to going out for a bond in May, it could change the bond committee’s recommendations to the School Board in January.
“That way we’re not going to waste a whole lot of time and money,” Peterson said.
Knapp, who said he had not heard about the possible survey, said a change in recommendation concerns him slightly, but he, like Peterson, hopes a favorable recommendation will still be brought to the School Board, whether the proposal is for the intended $18.5 million amount or something smaller.
“I mean, the need is there,” he said.
To across the river wrote on Nov 19, 2009 10:09 PM:
The negatives in Ontario do not care about the youth here and until the positives are heard, Ontario will continue it's spiral into the abyss.
The sad part is the negatives don't care because they fear change!
Some of the negatives CAN afford to invest in our schools yet claim they can't. Guaranteed! "