School bond issue will solve some critical issues, including safety

There are six critical and undeniable issues Olathe School Board president Amy Martin knows are facing students, staff and patrons of the Olathe Public Schools:

1. Olathe is going to need a fifth high school;

2. Olathe is going to need a 36th elementary school;

3. Olathe schools need to be made safer;

4. Outdated technology equipment need to be replaced and updated;

5. Many of Olathe’s schools are old and need to be updated; and

6. To accomplish those things, and more, the Olathe Public Schools will need to get the permission of patrons in the form of a $244.8 million bond issue on June 11.

A breakdown of how the bond money is to be spent can be seen by clicking here. An explanation of the school abbreviations can be seen by clicking here.

Oh, and there’s one other thing that Martin knows: Passing that bond issue will not increase taxes because of the way past boards have conducted bond elections.

“We have existing bonds that previous school boards have taken on and as those get paid off it gives us the opportunity to take on a new bond without raising taxes,” Martin said. “Previous boards have been really careful about planning these bonds out so we don’t see big fluctuations in our bond levy.

“We have a debt curve and it has a point in the future when it falls off. When it gets to that point, we can take on an additional bond without spiking taxes.”

The 58-member bond task force was co-chaired by John Hutchison, Erin Dugan and community co-chair Shannon Wickliffe. It was comprised of a variety of Olathe school district stakeholders, met five times earlier in the year and gave its recommendations to the school board on March 7. After some discussion, the board unanimously approved the bond measure at its March 19 meeting.

“The task force did an excellent job,” Martin said. “They had a great response from the community members that participated. We accepted all the recommendations except the drive between Olathe South High School and Heritage Elementary School.”

That issue involved traffic going in and out of Olathe South before and after school along 151st Street and Ridgeview Road. The recommendation to put a drive to and from Olathe South that went past Heritage School to South Lindenwood was met with opposition from concerned parents of Heritage students.

“Traffic on 151st gets really backed up and really dangerous,” Martin said. “We were exploring a different way for the kids to get out of the parking lot. There were some concerns on the part of the parents at Heritage Elementary so we decided until we had a better opportunity to talk with everybody involved that we would just hold tight on that (issue).”

The other issues in the bond are critical, she said.

“We’re going to need the (fifth high school) before we have the building (ready). I know that,” she said. “We did a study of the students coming up, just the students in our lower grades right now, and just the ones that are already here, and by the time they get to the high school we’re going to be pretty packed in our current high schools before this one gets built.”

Board member Harlan Parker said he voted for the bond issue and supports it.

“As a board, I think it’s important that we speak with one voice so we don’t have all these different messages,” he said. “The bottom line is we have to have a fifth high school. Where it’s going to be is yet to be determined.”

Martin said South and North high schools are close to capacity now. East is holding steady and Northwest, although it has room for increased enrollment, is growing quickly.

“We’ll adjust; we’ve done it before,” she said. “You don’t want to open up a new school with only a few kids in it. So you have to make do until you get enough students so you can officially open the next school.”

And while growth is one reason for the bond, there are other issues that need to be addressed. One of them is safety.

Olathe still has some open-room concept classes that the district wants to change to make students safer. Martin said the district has been doing that the past several years.

“We’ve been taking care of that just a couple of schools every year with what we can out of the capital outlet,” she said. “But with this bond, we’ll be able to finish up all of them, and if the bond passes, we will immediately start adding some features to some of our buildings to increase the safety of the students that are in there.”

A critical safety issue to Martin is building access. Several of the buildings’ offices are located inside the school away from the entrances.

“Right now we have locked doors and people are buzzed in,” she said. “But once you get buzzed in, there might be 50 yards between you and the office and that person could end up going anywhere in the building.

“I think it is important to move the offices to the front of the buildings. That way when visitors come into the school, they would have to go through an office and be checked in by somebody.

“That’s the big safety issue for me.”

In preparing the bond issue, a survey was done by the ETC Institute in Olathe to see if patrons might be in favor.

“The results of the survey were overwhelmingly positive,” Martin said.

But that doesn’t mean she thinks the bond issue is a shoe-in to pass.

“I have not heard of any opposition, yet,” she said. “But I don’t like to sit back. I think we definitely need to get out there and educate the community about what we’re asking them to approve.

“But I feel pretty confident that the people of the Olathe school district will get behind us.”