f you’ve never been in Valley View or Mt. Hall, you should go on their scheduled tours. They are 70-plus year old buildings that were built with used cement blocks from the former Farragut Naval Base after it was dismantled. Saved money at the time.
Have been updated and remodeled over and over again. There’s only so much that can be done in that old of a building … remodeling, repairing and painting aren’t enough to bring it up to today’s safety and building codes. They need to be replaced.
BCMS was built as the high school over 50 years ago. It also has been upgraded and repaired continuously. None of the buildings have been ignored as some people have suggested. Previous generations paid for schools for me and my kids to attend. We have continued supporting them when our grandkids attended. None there now, but we still support the current and future generations. Vote YES to replace Valley View School in November.
Linda Alt
Bonners Ferry
Enrollment doesn’t warrant four elementary schools
Boundary County has three elementary schools; Naples, Valley View and Mt. Hall.
You’re forgetting the new academy
It’s not classed as a district school and is not funded as are district schools.
Will it attract students from District schools? Hence lower enrollment
Perhaps it will, but does that absolve we as citizens the responsibility of providing safe public schools for all students whose parents choose they attend? Does it absolve the Idaho legislature of its constitutional mandate to fully fund public schools? Does it allow the state legislature to dance around the constitutional stricture, “thou shalt not expend taxpayer funds to support religious institutions,” to include schools?
It does not.
Religious, like the Mennonite school? Or the Seventh Day Adventist school? Sell Naples and use that money to upgrade Valley View. Better yet, sell Mt. Hall (128) and Naples (92). Valley View would now have 659 students. I’d vote yes on that.
Normally, I wouldn’t afford an anonymous respondent so much space, but the conversation has been interesting and perhaps there are others in the community (a check of the writer’s IP address shows the device used is in the Porthill area) who have the same or similar concerns as we are being asked to vote on both a facilities levy and an M&O levy at the same time. And let me clarify that my responses are mine alone, based solely on my experience covering School District 101 for more than three decades. For authoritative answers, I recommend asking District 101 Superintendent Jan Bayer, (208) 267-3146.
In response to this reply, the author fails to mention an essential and key point; that the religious schools mentioned are private and not supported or subsidized by the taxpayer. Such schools, perfectly legal, afford all parents a multitude of choices as to where and how their children are educated. They can even teach their children at home if they so choose.
The Idaho constitution states that the stability of a republican form of government depends on the intelligence of the people. Article IX mandates “compulsory attendance at schools” for children ages six through 18. The question, then, isn’t how children are educated, but at whose expense?
Another way to put it; all children whose parents aren’t teaching at home or sending the kids to a private school or other means as provided by law shall attend one of the state’s “general, uniform and thorough system of public, free common schools, paid for by the taxpayer as an investment in the stability of a republican form of government.
That, too, is a parental choice, but the choice of defining what a general, uniform and thorough school within that system would look like is not — those responsibilities are given to state board of education comprised of an elected state superintendent of public instruction and seven other voting members appointed by the governor, and by school districts, each led by a locally elected board whose members receive no compensation.
The sole specific restrictions mandated by the Idaho Constitution regard religion:
— Section 5. Sectarian appropriations prohibited. Neither the legislature nor any county, city, town, township, school district, or other public corporation, shall ever make any appropriation, or pay from any public fund or moneys whatever, anything in aid of any church or sectarian or religious society, or for any sectarian or religious purpose, or to help support or sustain any school, academy, seminary, college, university or other literary or scientific institution, controlled by any church, sectarian or religious denomination whatsoever; nor shall any grant or donation of land, money or other personal property ever be made by the state, or any such public corporation, to any church or for any sectarian or religious purpose; provided, however, that a health facilities authority, as specifically authorized and empowered by law, may finance or refinance any private, not for profit, health facilities owned or operated by any church or sectarian religious society, through loans, leases, or other transactions.
— Section 6. Religious test and teaching in school prohibited. No religious test or qualification shall ever be required of any person as a condition of admission into any public educational institution of the state, either as teacher or student; and no teacher or student of any such institution shall ever be required to attend or participate in any religious service whatever. No sectarian or religious tenets or doctrines shall ever be taught in the public schools, nor shall any distinction or classification of pupils be made on account of race or color. No books, papers, tracts or documents of a political, sectarian or denominational character shall be used or introduced in any schools established under the provisions of this article, nor shall any teacher or any district receive any of the public school moneys in which the schools have not been taught in accordance with the provisions of this article.
If you’re a parent in Idaho and you want your children educated in the tenets of your faith, public education may not be your best choice.
There might be a legitimate discussion of consolidating down to one central public elementary school, though I doubt many outlying parents would be willing to get up early enough to get the kids off to the bus in time for the two or three hour ride to school. But the county’s private schools have no place in the discussion.
So said Evergreen parents.
How did that turn out?
Poorly