KSD seeking Plant and Facility Levy approval

KELLOGG — The Kellogg School District is seeking yes votes from their constituency in regard to their upcoming Plant and Facility Levy that will be voted on May 15.

The proposed levy amount is $575,000 per year for 10 years for a total of $5,750,000, and it must pass with a 60 percent approval.

With Secure Rural Schools funds seemingly vanishing by the hundreds of thousands, the KSD school board recently decided to seek additional funding from the community to help repair and maintain their buildings across the district. The proposed amount would just be over half of what KSD needs to get their buildings fully up to where they want them.

“We’ve been trying to get ahead of this for a while now because we saw this coming,” KSD superintendent Woody Woodford said. “In 2013, we ran a plant and facility levy vote and it failed, but we’ve done everything we can, including vacating the former middle school. Around that same time in 2013, we did a facility study, and after looking at all of the facilities in the district, we found out we had about $10 million in building needs.”

Despite coming up short in that previous vote, the district still attempted to stay on top of the maintenance duties for all of the buildings, but with dwindling forest funding, that has become near impossible.

“We were able to kind of keep up with it,” Woodford said. “Even though it was with bubblegum, bailing wire and duct tape. But that was when we were still getting SRS funds.”

In 2007, KSD received a high of $725,000 in SRS funds from the federal government, but that declined all the way down to $63,000 received last year.

The structure of the levy is a simple one.

According to KSD, the levy will ask $1.04 for every $1,000 in taxable property value. This means that for a property worth $100,000, the owner would pay an extra $104 per year.

As far as Woodford is concerned, voting down the levy will only prolong the inevitable, but could also come with dire consequences.

“I think it was FRAM who used the slogan, ‘You can pay now or you can pay later’ and I think that really applies here,” Woodford said. “You pay now and keep up with things or you don’t and down the road you end up trying to fund a multi-million dollar building project and nobody wants to go their wallet for that one.”

The district has already provided a list of things that they want to upgrade, both district-wide and specific to each school.

Across the district, upgrading security features at each building by adding cameras and recording devices to the new single-entry systems is at the top of the list.

At Canyon Elementary, upgrading the interior and exterior doors, as well as a new fire alarm and smoke detection system are the top priorities.

Pinehurst Elementary has a multitude of issues that need resolved, including a new mass notification, clock and bell system, removing windows from between the classrooms and hallways, better lighting in the playground and parking areas, water lines replaced, asphalt repair, eave and gutter systems over outside doors, and upgraded fire and smoke alarm systems.

Kellogg Middle School is still in its transformation from elementary school to junior high, so adding locker rooms to the gymnasium is a priority, but there are also repairs that need to be made to the road driving up to the building, as well as catch basins to prevent the annual flooding that takes places along the roadway.

At Kellogg High School, repairing the gymnasium roof and upgrading the aging bleacher setups are the two biggest projects, but the metal shop area will also be looking for upgrades to its ventilation system.