04/29/2024
I am looking forward to the combined meeting tonight with our neighboring cities and towns. The purpose of this meeting is to discuss entering into an interlocal agreement and securing the decision for our collective residents on how we would like to separate from the Alpine School District. There are many reasons I have been in favor of exploring this option over the last year. The most glaring reasons for me has been that due to the size of our school district geographically, there are many different competing needs that can't all be met.
A perfect example was the bond measure that was introduced with schools that were already needed for overcrowded elementaries, middle schools and high schools in Eagle Mountain and Saratoga Springs. On the same bond were multiple existing elementary schools in the Orem area that no longer met the safety standards and needed to be rebuilt or torn down. I am not going to get into the weeds on this subject, but suffice it say, that because there were strong opinions on this that caused the bond to fail, the schools in Eagle Mountain and Saratoga Springs that needed to be built to put students in a safe learning environment, didn't get built, still aren't built. The district had to use the now controversial revenue bond to build the middle school in Eagle Mountain to take the 9th grade out of the Cedar Valley High School to relieve some of the overcrowding temporarily until the new High School could be built. The district then used the revenue bond to secure the funds to begin building a new high school in Saratoga Springs (though not in a very ideal location based on the growth areas in Saratoga Springs and Eagle Mountain). The 4 school board members representing Orem then voted to remove the revenue bond leaving no plan to build a high school that is about 2 years overdue.
So, what is the outcome in our community because of these ill thought out decisions? We have elementary schools approaching 1000 and a few well over 1000 students. Each one has multiple portable classrooms with poor A/C and heating and pest problems. Our middle schools and High Schools have 10-20+ outdoor classrooms with the same conditions. Multiple elementary schools start lunch at just after 10am with reduced lunch recess time to accommodate the rotation of students needed to get all students through lunch. Multiple times this year, many elementary schools in Eagle Mountain and Saratoga Springs ran out of the regular lunch and had to try to supplement the remaining students with cereal and piece meal items. We have nightmare scenarios for drop off and pick up because bussing is no longer available, drop off and pickup times are no longer staggered, and the proximity of schools is creating stacking of cars throughout neighborhoods and onto collector and arterial roads. This then has the effect of stopping or severely slowing people trying to leave the cities to get to work.
We have the hardest working school board member in the state with Julie King. Unfortunately, she is one person and combined with Saratoga Springs newest Board member Joylin Lincoln we are severely under represented on the school board. You may ask why that is since the board members are determined by population census. When Saratoga Springs and Eagle Mountain's approximately 25,000 students make up about 28% of the approximately 87,000 total student population for the entire district, it’s easy to make the argument that where the greatest needs are has the least representation. What's even more frustrating is that the way the revenue is collected by the district is based on 3 things give or take. #1 is Weighted Pupil Unit (WPU), #2 Property taxes, #3 state and federal program dollars. 65% of the total revenue is from the State income taxes and distributed as the WPU. The discussions about which city has the most property tax contribution needs to be taken in to consideration for sure, but as you can see in the graphic (Financial Considerations - Revenue) from MGT (Feasibility Study Consultants for ASD), it is still only just over 23% of the total revenue collected by the school district.
The context of this is important in understanding the reasoning behind separating from the school district. We provide a substantial revenue from WPU to the district from Eagle Mountain and Saratoga Springs. Then when we ask for the basic needs of our students consisting of a school to learn in, school sites that don't create dangerous traffic and pedestrian situations, classroom sizes that are manageable for teachers and allow for more one on one interaction with the students, enough food to feed all of the students, a lunch break that enables them to both eat and have a much needed brain break, lunch times that aren't an hour after they get to school and then leave them hungry in the afternoon, we are told those aren't as important as rebuilding aging schools that are half full and need to have boundary adjustments to combine students populations into half as many schools. I have attended a few of the MGT meetings in person and watched a few more online. I have watched and listened to school board meetings and presentations filled with fear mongering to discourage a split. It is incredibly disappointing to listen to "experts" scare parents of special education children, title 1 students, dual language immersion students, Career and Technical Education (CTE) students, teachers and administrators in our schools.
I am looking forward to meeting with the voters of Eagle Mountain and Saratoga Springs to provide the truth of our financial health as a newly formed district. Better representation that will be 100% local and tasked with meeting the needs of our students in our area with our challenges. I am enthusiastic about what will be possible with teacher, substitute, specialty teacher compensation with a beginning $27 million surplus that will grow each year with our housing growth and economic development future extremely bright. With community business partners like Facebook, Google, QTS, Tract, Walmart and Costco to name a few, there are many opportunities for education grants and programs as part of their community outreach programs. The basic message is that the federal and state money that are program specific are available to all school districts. The additional program opportunities are bright with our financial health starting a school district.
Please feel free to reach out to me to talk with me about this. I will try to be better checking Facebook, I can also be reached on my council number 801-980-1195 and by email [email protected]
I included the option 4 from MGT which represents the most likely split for the other parts of the district. With the exception of Option 1(no split) and Option 2 (two-way split, Lehi and West and the rest stays), Eagle Mountain, Saratoga Springs, Fairfield and Cedar Fort are separate from the others.
Just some context of the graphics. The top line represents a snapshot of the day they ran the numbers, those numbers are going up daily. Our student population and surplus will continue to grow. Line two that lays out a hypothetical $200 million bond shows what the yearly payment would be and the cost of property taxes if the board decided not to pay the bond with surplus dollars.
Possibilities with the surplus would enable increased teacher pay, building an elementary school every other year while also meeting the startup costs. SB221 the new law that directs splitting of school district also allows for Municipalities that are in an interlocal agreement to offer loans to the new school district or allow them to use their credit rating to secure loans.
Lastly, I want to thank the different city council members and mayors that I, our other council members and our mayor have sat down with in many, many conversations over the last 3-4 months to discuss who to make the best and healthiest decisions for our citizens. I look forward to working with our regional partners, and all the other cities in Utah county on our shared interests and needs. We have incredible leadership in so many cities in Utah county that are trying to do what is best for their cities and surrounding communities.
