Health & Fitness
School Board Candidate Gregg Geerdes and Prof. Gregory House Came up w/ Specific Plans for Not Closing ICCSD Schools
Both school board candidate Gregg Geerdes, an attorney here in Iowa City, and Gregory House, a University of Iowa professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy, came up with specific plans for increasing capacity without closing Hoover.
Actually, Prof. House came up with a plan for increasing capacity at City High without closing Hoover and saving money in the process. He shared his plan with the entire board, and offered to share his plan with any member of the public who would like to see it.
You can contact him at home or at his office at the university.
Gregg Geerdes came up with a comprehensive plan to avoid closing any Iowa City Community School District schools.
When I asked him for a copy of his 7/23 speech, he said he just uses bullet points and throws them away. But he gave me this summary:
"My basic concern is that the school board has approved projects which cost about $260 million dollars. We have about $150 million to spend unless we can pass a bond issue, which I think is doubtful given the lack of confidence in the board and administration.
"Therefore, we need to focus our building projects on things which add needed capacity. To me it doesn't make sense to close Hoover for this reason. If we don't close it, we could get by with two new eastside schools instead of three. And I think that if we build a new high school (which I think we need) this will push back the need to add capacity at City High for a number of years. And the administration can never seem to present any hard numbers to support its claim that small schools are so inefficient to operate.
"We need to focus on the capacity problem, which is not being done. For example, renovation work has been approved for NW Junior High, which already has excess capacity. That's not where we should be spending our money.
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"We can fix our capacity needs for the foreseeable future for $150 million by, for example building a new high school, two eastside elementary schools, and expanding Southeast and North Central junior highs. But if we don't focus on the capacity issue, we will be out of money in less than five years.
At that point the kids will really begin to suffer because they will be cramped. And we likely won't be able to pass a bond issue (which needs a 60% vote) to help the situation. Focusing on capacity means that not everyone will get what they want, but people will understand if you lay out the numbers and tell them why we can't afford it.
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"The travesty is that the facilities planning committee was put to work without being told how much money they had to spend. That was a serious management error in my opinion."
Gregg's plan would save money on expensive current district plans that spend millions of district dollars without adding capacity to schools and would stay under the budget of the current Revenue Purpose Plan without going back to the taxpayers for more money, a risky proposition at best.
I plan to support both Gregg Geerdes and Phil Hemingway for the school board because they support the values of vital, quality neighborhood schools in walkable communities.
Phil Hemingway wants walkable and sustainable neighborhoods and neighborhood schools, and he repairs motorized vehicles for a living. How's that for integrity? We could use a lot more of that integrity to improve the level of trust we have in our school board.
As many community speakers have observed in school board meetings, we don't have a lot of trust in our school board or our district administration now. That is a serious problem, not just now but for the future.
Do you want your kids to be able to walk to their neighborhood schools within close proximity to their home and community, or do you want them to be bused or driven to larger schools further away? Do you want to help destroy affordable neighborhoods in friendly, involved, livable inner cities and start building out in the suburbs, making vehicle traffic necessary for every errand and trip to school?
As Mike Carberry said, "I come at this (closing Hoover) as a professional environmentalist. Are we going to close Hoover, which children can walk to from their own neighborhood, and put those children in a long line of idling cars instead, increasing our carbon footprint instead?"
Mike Carberry was one of the people who stopped Berkshire-Hathaway, which owns MidAmerican, from charging customers in advance for a nuclear power plant that many of us don't even want, considering the precarious state of some of the nuclear power plants we already have during the last few floods.
As Susan Oliver said, small children like their own small school that they can walk to in their own neighborhood. And a very small little Hoover student in the first grade came up to the microphone and said the same thing. She had a prepared speech and was able to read it unassisted! I'd say that's a stroke for Hoover and her parents! And it sounded like she'd written it herself.