ipsdweb.ipsd.org/News.aspx?id=15630Elementary School Air Conditioning
Reported by janet_buglio@ipsd.org on 8/28/07
The following comments are from Board President Mark Metzger on elementary school air conditioning:
With warmer temperatures, parents have asked why we don't have air conditioning in each of our elementary schools.
In the 1980s the district began using our model of community involvement in major decisions, including referenda. Referendum committees were established and tasked with recommending what should be placed on the ballot for referendum voting.
In the late 1980s, we built Brookdale and Georgetown as the new prototype elementary schools. At that time, elementary schools were being built at a rough cost of $4 million. The additional cost of air conditioning was about $500,000 or so per building. In the earliest days of the building referenda (late 80s, early 90s), some referendum committee members took great pride in pointing out to their fellow taxpayers that they’d saved $1,500,000 by not including air conditioning in the referendum for three new elementary schools, not to mention the electricity savings.
For some, it was an important selling point that the tax increase was a bare bones approach and fiscally conservative; at 12-15% of the building cost, it also looked pretty smart to a lot of people. Some did question whether that was short-sighted, but the “it’s only really needed for three weeks a year” argument tended to carry a lot of weight, particularly when the parents’ own non-air conditioned experiences were brought back to mind (“We lived without it….”).
Referendum committees adopted a four question approach to doing the work of shaping referendum requests:
1. What do we want?
2. What do we need?
3. What can we afford?
4. What will the public support?
If you read the questions in that order, they force continual reductions: The answers to question 1 are (and were) both expansive and expensive. The “need” question pared the list down from a wish list to a “must have” list. The “afford” and “sell” questions forced difficult decisions with the goal of making painful choices to ensure passage of the most vital of the “must have” elements.
Since 1991, the question of air conditioning has been on every referendum committee’s consideration list from two perspectives:
1. Should we air condition the new elementary schools we are proposing to build?
2. Should we go back and air-condition the older ones?
In the early 90s, the questions were viewed by referendum committees as closely linked. The committees tended to conclude that if they couldn’t afford to air-condition the older buildings, they couldn’t, for reasons of parity, air-condition the newest ones. They concluded that air conditioning the older elementary schools couldn’t be “afforded” at the time because the referendum would be too expensive. Some argued that air conditioning the new buildings was tantamount to thumbing noses at those who built and occupied the older schools and that the resulting disparity would cause the existing parts of the district without air conditioning to vote down the referendum on “fairness” issues.
The mid-90s brought the first waves of really large-scale growth and building. The district grew by about 2,000 new students per year in the mid-90s. Far and away most important goal was ensuring that building referenda would pass, since the consequences of failure were so dire. The same decisions and arguments drove the same results, with the added component that as the number of non-air conditioned elementary schools grew, the line item to “catch up” rapidly got so
large, that it was very easy to take it off at the “afford” level and the parity issue continued to keep it out of the newer schools.
In 2001, the referendum committee for the first time decided that the issues of air conditioning new buildings and air conditioning existing buildings were separate. While they concluded that they did not wish to ask the public for $800,000 per building to air condition the existing elementary buildings, they also concluded that there was no longer any reason to continue to build elementary schools without air conditioning. That's why only two of our 21 elementary schools, Owen and Peterson, are air conditioned.
In some ways, this is perfect proof of the old adage that hindsight is 20/20. From hot August days in 2007, it hardly seems to be sensible not to have air conditioned the elementary schools. From the standpoint of abject terror over failing a referendum by asking for too much in the early 90s, it made a lot more sense. In hindsight it’s easy to forget just how hard-fought these referendum campaigns were. In 1994, there were people who were adamantly opposed to building Neuqua Valley because we would never be able to fill a second high school in this district and it will sit unused.
There is no reason that a group of citizens could not propose a building bond referendum to air condition the remaining elementary schools. There has never been Board or administrative opposition to doing so. Historically, however, referenda initiated and led by the Board and the Administration are doomed to failure, so I doubt such an effort would ever start there.
Mark Metzger, President
Board of Education
