EDITOR: The way Morgan Hill School District does business is
scary. A month ago the classified employees
’ president, Bev Walker, stood at the podium and asked the board
to spend money as if it were coming out of their own check-books.
That was excellent advice.
EDITOR:
The way Morgan Hill School District does business is scary. A month ago the classified employees’ president, Bev Walker, stood at the podium and asked the board to spend money as if it were coming out of their own check-books. That was excellent advice.
Trustees should also have been running the district’s building projects as if they were building their own homes. If they had, I wonder if they would have let the projects more than double in price (like Barrett Elementary), or if they would have allowed them to still not be signed off almost three years after occupancy.
And if they were remodeling their own home (Live Oak), I wonder if they would have been satisfied with a lawn (the football field) they can’t run on, an almost new pool with several operating flaws, and so many other design and structural mistakes on the buildings, it boggles the mind. I also wonder if they would have abandoned that remodel job in order to build the real house of their dreams (Sobrato) and spare no costs, even though they don’t have sufficient funds.
I wonder, for example, if, for this ultimate dream house (the others were just stepping stones in the scheme of things), they would put in landscaping that would be extremely expensive to maintain, and if they would jump into pool ownership without a clue as to what the pool would cost them to operate on a yearly basis. Actually, I doubt it – if they were spending their own hard earned money (instead of taxpayers’ money), they would most likely be very cautious not to exceed the budget and not to get in over their heads with high maintenance costs.
That’s why it amazed me to hear at the last board meeting, when Trustee Amina Khemici asked what the new pool at Sobrato would cost to maintain (money that would come out of the general fund), construction manager Al Solis had no idea what the cost would be. Worse yet, when she asked what the Live Oak pool cost to maintain (which would be a comparable figure since the pools will be the same size), no one had an answer for that either!
So, not only have they not planned at all for a school that will be opening in seven months, but they are, evidently, also clueless about their current expenditures …. It’s interesting, though, how they had a figure for the main-tenance costs of Britton’s pool when they wanted to convince the board to okay filling it in, yet they can’t come up with a maintenance cost for Live Oak’s pool when they need it to determine if building a pool at Sobrato is fiscally sound.
The other thing I can’t figure out is how MHSD can be building and funding a new school despite declining enrollment and drastic budget cuts while many of our neighboring school districts (San Jose, Oak Grove, Campbell, Monterey, etc.) are closing schools because of declining enrollment and budget cuts. And then, better yet, our district plans on opening the new school with a third as many students as Live Oak will house in its ramshackle condition.
As a result they will have spent $80 million on a school that will take years and years to reach capacity, while Live Oak – that has a whole $3.5 million allocated to it in order to finish tens of millions of dollars worth of promised renovations – will once again be bursting at the seams (isn’t that why we voted for the bond in the first place – to alleviate overcrowding at Live Oak? – of course, I can’t be sure because it was so long ago, it has become a distant memory) with nearly 2,000 students (they projected 1,820 plus 76 transfers, but I doubt they included all the people who have “moved” since the boundaries were drawn, so my estimate is that it’s probably closer to 2,000).
Makes sense, doesn’t it? Believe me, nothing makes sense at the school board meetings these days. When Shelle Thomas or Amina Khemici ask obvious and imperative questions, such as, “How are we going to pay for this?” they are scolded by the superintendent for putting her staff on the defensive! Wouldn’t you love to run a multi-million dollar company, and when your boss asks you what expenditures are going out and/or are being planned on for future output, you just reprimand him for asking questions? Of course, you’d probably be fired on the spot – unless you had a very generous and iron-clad contract … .
Yes, the meetings have become somewhat of a circus, but the same old act is wearing thin. The three-ring circus consists of ambiguous reports being announced in one ring, while the tightrope walking old board members nod in agreement in another ring.
The three new board members, who are fierce tigers (at least in the eyes of the administration) are growling in the third ring asking the questions which should have been asked by the other four trustees years ago (then perhaps we wouldn’t be in the financial mess we are right now). What the circus needs is a ringmaster who can unite the circus performers in order to accomplish reasonable goals and get back to the business of educating the children … .
Brooke Bailey, Morgan Hill
Editor’s note: Brooke Bailey is the mother of two children in the district and a teacher at Britton Middle School.
