Voters Spoke, Board Must Listen

Bentonville school officials, reeling from this week’s defeat of a proposed millage increase to build a new high school, might look to other area school districts’ experience for the next step.

Officials in both Fayetteville and Springdale similarly had to deal with initial losses on millage votes in recent years, but both eventually won voter favor for tax hikes.

Bentonville’s doubledigit defeat (58-42 percent) Tuesday leaves the school district with an unsolved overcrowding problem, one that will only get worse as district enrollment continues to grow.

The district asked patrons for a 6.7-mill property tax increase to pay for a 2,000-student second high school and more.

The high school was to have been built in Centerton, with complete athletic facilities, for an estimated $94 million. The athletic facilities would have cost an additional $23 million. Also included were funds to remodel Bentonville High School and to provide technology and other improvements throughout the district,adding up to a total project cost of $128 million.

“We have to look at how we lost and where we lost,” a disappointed Superintendent Michael Poore said after the vote.

A more significant question is why the district’s proposal failed.

There are all sorts of post-mortem theories, the most obvious being the size of the package and a tax increase that would have taken the district’s overall millage rate to 50.4 mills, the highest in the state.

There is specific criticism of athletics-related spending, too, which has been calculated at 18 cents of every dollar of the proposal.

From that standpoint, the parallel between what happened in Bentonville and in Springdale is strong.

Both districts included major spending for sports facilities in their initial proposals.

Springdale revised its 2010 proposal significantly and went back to voters in 2011 with a plan that stripped out the controversial athletic spending. Voters, who had defeated the initial proposal by double digits, approved new taxes for classrooms.

Mind you, Bentonville oftcials made a pretty strong case for including athletic facilities for the second high school.

Nevertheless, chances are they’ll have to consider doing as Springdale did.

But their best guidance might come from Fayetteville, where voters turned down a millage hike in 2009 to build a pricey new high school.

That district, too, came back later with a proposal that was acceptable to its school patrons. But, perhaps more importantly, the district took an interim step to determine why the first vote failed.

Maybe a month out from the failed vote in 2009, then new-Superintendent Vicki Thomas mailed surveys to the 10,000-plus patrons who participated in that election.

They were asked to return postage-paid postcards ranking the mostcompelling reasons for their votes. Surprisingly, more than 6,000 of those voters responded, including more than 4,500 who voted against the ballot issue.

The survey provided some insight into why the respondents voted as they had. In that instance, the $113 million price tag for a new high school was the most compelling reason cited by those who voted the tax down.

There were other reasons cited, too, and all went into consideration for a 2010 proposal that eventually passed in Fayetteville.

Bentonville today is right where the Springdale and Fayetteville school districts were after their respective failed votes.

The need for new facilities is as real the day after the election as it was before the vote.

And the Bentonville School District, like the others before it, still must figure out how to relieve its overcrowding problems.

In the meantime, oft cials there have got a lot of listening to do to fi gure out why voters rejected the first plan.

BRENDA BLAGG IS A COLUMNIST FOR NWA MEDIA.