Vote No

Caption: From left to right, Anita and Phil Hemingway at the Labor Day picnic, September 2016.

I will be voting NO on the proposed Iowa City Community School District (ICCSD) GO bond on the September 12th ballot for many reasons. I’ll mention a few here but I can be reached by any stakeholder who wishes to discuss it in detail.

First: There is no serious commitment to career and technical education. Nowhere in the $191.5 million bond language is there any mention of adding facilities for career and technical education at any of our schools. At several school board candidates’ forums, questions were asked about the importance of offering career and technical programming and courses in the ICCSD. All candidates recognized the importance of career and technical education for our students and some mentioned programming varying from construction and automotive to vocational agricultural and Future Farmers of America (FFA).

Over the past 15-20 years, we have seen a major decimation of our career and technical course offerings at the building level. Our homebuilding program, which was eliminated, had built 39 homes in the ICCSD. This curriculum and programming should be brought back immediately and we can celebrate the construction of our 40th house in our communities with student labor. The 8/20/17 Des Moines Register and the 7/21/17 Cedar Rapids Gazette talk of workforce crisis and lack of skilled trained workers jeopardizing the future of our state.

Career and technical facilities must be written into any bond language to ensure construction. As Yul Brynner’s character said in "The Ten Commandments:" “So let it be written, so let it be done.”

Second: I am deeply concerned about our special education program in the past five years. Due to serious violations of law, the Iowa State Department of Education intervened in 2016. They will continue to oversee our special education program for two more years due to past deficiencies. The racial disproportionality we have in the use of seclusion rates is alarming. The need for proper facilities to handle growing special education needs are not specifically addressed in the GO bond language despite increasing special education needs. The absence of a specified commitment in bond language to special education facility needs (such as conversion of seclusion rooms to calming rooms) shows a lack of concern for our present and future special education students. Let’s plan for it; let’s budget for it ; let’s bond for it ; let’s build it. “So let it be written, so let it be done.”

Additional concerns are the demolition of a highly successful elementary school (an $11 million asset) without a clear plan for future use and the district’s decades long inability to provide accessible school and playground facilities for ALL students. Remember, compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act is not an option; it's the law. And athletic facilities on a par with a Ferrari when a Ford would do HAVE been built and are planned. Hills is completely omitted and we may need to build to build more schools in North Liberty and Coralville. The bond language needs to specify dollar amounts for specific projects to assure accountability.

Ultimately, the community will decide how the bond will succeed or fail. As a community member, I am one vote, and as a board member, I am one vote. If the bond succeeds, I will be a fiscal watchdog of district funds, as I have tried to be in my nearly two years of service on the board. If the bond fails, the present and new board members will prioritize needs using the Facilities Master Plan (FMP) as a guide to bring to the public a smaller bond as soon as six months after this one and continue with the needed renovation and construction of our district’s facilities.

My views are mine alone and do not reflect the views of the ICCSD board as a whole, and are expressed here as my right as a U.S. citizen granted me under the Constitution of the United States which is not superseded by any board policy or other board governance.

-- Phil Hemingway