February/March 2012 - Laramie County School District #01

Public Schools’ Chronicle February 2012 • 9Prairie Wind site location should notbe mandated by state legislatureBy Dr. Mark StockLaramie CountySchool District 1Superintendent of SchoolsThere are three reasonswhy a majority of theschool board is concernedabout a proposed appropriationsbill that would requirePrairie Wind Elementary to bebuilt at The Pointe.1. Loss of local control—Forcing Prairie Wind off theIron Mountain site over to ThePointe through state legislativemeans is a precedent-settingaction. Seldom has a statelegislature been asked to voteon the location for a specificschool in a specific school districtover and above the wishesof the majority of the locallyelected school board officials.Most folks in Wyoming don’tapprove of the federal governmentintervening in our state,let alone other state officialstrumping elected school boardmembers who are doing theirbest to make good fiscal andoperational decisions.Laramie County School District1 school board membersare elected “at large,” whichmeans the person who receivesthe most votes wins. By oath ofoffice they must represent theschool district’s entire populacebecause every voter in thedistrict has a say over who getselected. They must representstudents, parents and taxpayerswho live in all areas of ourcommunity. By nature of theway state legislative districts areset up, local legislators are onlyelected by people who live ina small geographic area of thecounty. Unlike the state officialswho may vote on this issue, ourschool board members havebeen involved in reviewing feasibilityand engineering studies,conducting fiscal analysis andreviewing architectural renderings.They are intimately awareof the issues facing families inall areas of our district. Moststate legislators, on the otherhand, would not have this detailedinformation. We wouldjust ask that people considerthe situation and how it couldspiral to affect the decisionmakingprocess in the future.Is it fair that someone fromPowell or Cody gets to vote onthe location of your school?We believe this would set a badprecedent no matter where youthink the best spot for a schoolis.The majority of the peopleat The Pointe want a schoolin their neighborhood. I can’tblame them—many people livingin our small communitieswould like to have a neighborhoodschool for their childrento walk to. In fact, the parentsin the rural north, where PrairieWind is going to be located,want a school. There are 450rural families who would loveto have a school closer to theminstead of being bused all theway into town. This group ofparents has been largely quiet,trusting the local process toeventually settle on a site fortheir school. The problem wasfinding a good site in the ruralnorth. Our school board firstsettled on a site located at RidingClub and Kentucky. Thisproved to be unpopular withthe community so the administratorswere asked to review30+ sites and bring a new selectionof locations to the board.During several public worksessions, the board eventuallysettled on the current statesection of land located at IronMountain.We believe that it would bebad public policy for legislatorsfrom around the state to be votingon what lot a specific schoolshould be located on, ignoringthe locally elected officials whoare closest to the voters whoelected them.2. This action will delay theopening of Prairie Wind fortwo more years—Prairie Windat Iron Mountain is slated toopen in the fall of 2014. However,if the state approves a billmandating Prairie Wind’s locationbe located in The Pointe, itwill delay the school’s openinguntil 2016. We are alreadyovercrowded with hundredsof parents forced to have theirchildren bused all over townto fill any available classroomspace. Delaying the project twomore years is not in the bestinterest of our in-town childrenor the 450 students living inthe rural north. Meanwhile,enrollment projections pointto more growth as we projectan increase of almost 700 moreelementary students in the nextfour years based on currentbirth rates.3. It costs more to movePrairie Wind to ThePointe. Why?—The Pointe hashigher site development costs.We estimate that the cost tomove the site location wouldadd more than $3 million tothe cost of the project. Previousarchitectural design workcannot be used, which wastesadditional money. The currentdrawings are at 30 percent.The site at Iron Mountain isclose enough in layout to thefirst site at Riding Club so thatmuch of the work can be used.The Pointe site would requirestarting design work fromscratch. These things, combinedwith the delays, point to a moreexpensive school project. Wedon’t believe this is good use ofpublic funds.As a whole, the LCSD1school board has not said therewould never be a school at ThePointe. In fact, they directedthe school administration toconduct an internal study of thecurrent Pointe site as a potentialnext site for a two-sectionschool to be built after PrairieWind. Those studies, which arealmost complete, indicate thatwith some modifications thesite might work for a two-sectionschool, albeit with higherdevelopment costs, though stilldoable. That decision is stillunder discussion. However, forthe reasons stated above, webelieve forcing Prairie Wind toThe Pointe is bad for students,bad for budgets and bad precedentin general.LCSD1 needs several newschools as soon as possible andany further delays will continueto hurt our students.