“The Kappa question went through which we were really grateful for, operation didn’t. So, we went back through after that and sort of reevaluated our entire list; strategic planning, surveying and said you know what let’s resurvey. Let’s talk to parents and figure out, is this the list that people like to see integrated into our system, wider priorities, things of that nature and we came back to some conclusions over about a three to six month span of different surveys to our parents, our students, our staff and our community at large asking what priorities were, asking what they are thinking about as they thought about our district and future and then took that to the board for about months to say, with the data we have, here’s basically what we’ve found out and here’s what we believe the plan is moving forward for our district”, said Brian Dietz, the Superintendent of Centennial Schools District. RELATED LINKS: The three questions each address different areas of student learning. The first question would continue current programs in place for an additional 10 years. “So question one is renewal. We have a levy that expired, or actually is expiring this year back from 2009 and basically this will be a tax question and what it does is that it maintains most of the programs and services we have in our district at this point.” The second question would increase educational offerings and would come with a tax increase for property owners. Dietz said, “The second question is a $590 per pupil ask which ends up being about 92 cents a day or $336 a year. And that really is a program and services piece across the board. So, things that we want to include in that is STEM: science, technology, engineering and math. We have a program we already started a few years back in the middle school and we’re growing it to high school now too. And we’ve heard from our parents that they want us to have opportunity for all students across the board. So we’re actually going to offer it as an elementary requirement and expand our high school requirements. Interventions are really important as well. We’ve heard from parents that have not only struggling students or high achievers, but somewhere in the middle. We want to really work with students to support them and to provide their needs to help them be successful, so why not offer them programs, services and more staffing to that as well. Mental health, mental health is a big issue in our country. We want to offer more programs for our students. The third question on the ballot would address the ever growing desire to integrate more technology into learning. “Technology is a big part of what I do. And so, we’re asking for a $1.8 million ask. What that ends up being is $167 a year and 46 cents a day. And that really sort of covers a broad stroke or where we really need to be moving forward. It offers devices in the hands of kids from Pre-K all the way through our adult learners. We also have systems in place as well that will help to support that. It’s interesting the last five years, we have probably tripled the amount of devices we have in this district, we’ve added no people to help support that. We need people to help support it, we need coaches in the classroom, we need software and technical experts to help really manage our systems overall. This brings all that to light overall. More importantly it does it in a very sustainable way that we can really grow our programs and hit a need that we hear from our students and our general public that they want to see really advance which is 21st century learning. The estimated tax increases mentioned by Superintendent Dietz are based on a home valued at $250,000. The technology levy would enable the district to eventually put a device in the hands of every high school student and have many classroom sets of devices available for younger students. Superintendent Dietz made it clear that they will listen to the voters no matter the outcome. “Whatever the outcomes are, we want to take a look at that piece and if we feel like you know what this is where we need to be, we want to be respectful and not go back out again as well. I think we’re at a point we’re saying, we’ve listened a lot which I think is great, we need to listen every day to what our students and parents are telling us. We feel like we have a pretty good sense of where things are at, so we hope that again, going out, shows that intentionality of their ten year asks overall, so we’re really intentional that again this is what you want. And our goal is saying if you go ahead and approve these we’re not coming back out.” He also cautioned that losing all three questions would mean difficult cuts. “If we loose all three questions it would be devastating. We would have to make some cuts and we’ve talked about that during our campaign about the fact that these are the needs that we’ve identified and that communities have helped us identify overall. We want to be honest back and say these are the realities and if we don’t have some of these resources in place, we’ll lose some services, programs, and more importantly, staff which tends to be the backbone of any district in the state overall.” A multi-year process will come to fruition on the first Tuesday in November as voters go to the polls – the district is hoping that they have found the right package of questions for the voters. “This has been a pretty mindful process through 2011 and 2012 to plan that identify these core pieces. We’ve surveyed now in the last two years pretty extensively in our community parents and students to find out, if these are your resources you are looking for heading forward, you want to make sure you’re hitting the mark with what you’re going to do and we’ve heard from them. Yes, this is what we’d like to see in our buildings. We’ve trimmed things off the list as well. We’re trying to be mindful of the fact that there has got to be a threshold with the public that says you know what I’m going to support this and there’s a threshold saying that we’re not going to go there because we know it’s not respectful to you as a tax payer”, Dietz concluded.
Levy Questions Await Centennial Voters
BLAINE, Minn. – {Oct. 8, 2015} – The Centennial School District is putting three different levy questions before voters this year after they brought two questions last year that yielded mixed results.
