An undue burden
At Monday’s special Moscow School Board meeting about the possible plan to close Russell Elementary School and relocate students and teachers, I was moved by sincere concerns regarding uprooting students and the loss of a much-loved school building.
However, I was also moved by the sincere expressions of appreciation for all the wonderful teachers and administrators in our district who work very hard to ensure that every student, no matter where they come from or what abilities they have, is welcomed and guaranteed to feel they belong, no matter what school they attend.
We truly have an exceptional school district, but we have serious problems with our school facilities. There is a clear reason for this.
Not only has the Idaho Legislature disregarded its constitutional duty to “maintain a general, uniform and thorough system of public, free common schools,” it has ignored the Idaho Supreme Court’s 2005 ruling that the Legislature is primarily responsible for financing public school facilities without regard to “valuation of local property.” Idaho school districts must pass facility bonds with a two-thirds majority, the highest rate in the nation. The burden of funding school facilities should not rest on property owners. It rests on our elected legislators who have not taken their duty seriously. It is time for a change.
I am running for the Idaho Legislature (District 6 Seat B) because, as a former Moscow teacher, I am determined to search for solutions to Idaho’s underfunded public schools and relieve property owners of this undue burden.
Kathy Dawes
Moscow
The deeper dive
In response to the column, “The Issues facing WSU deserve a deeper dive” by Patricia Hunt and Ron Mittelhammer (Daily News, March 20), I agree that WSU deserves a deeper dive.
When Kirk Schulz was hired as WSU president in 2016, a priority was to clean up many of the problems that Mittlehammer et al. identified in their recent “Time for Change” survey. The survey and the recent opinion column by Mittelhammer and Hunt failed to address this salient point: the problems attributed to Schulz and WSU Provost and Executive Vice President Elizabeth Chilton were well entrenched long before Schulz arrived. Why were matters so out of control before Schulz assumed his position as WSU president, and who was responsible for these failings? Getting answers to these questions is where a deep dive is needed. I strongly encourage the Daily News to pursue this matter.
The WSU AAUP position is simple: WSU faculty would be better served through empowerment of the faculty and increased shared governance. Mittlehammer and Hunt’s crude dismissal of this position as “dangerous” leaves the distinct impression that WSU faculty — with the exception of those “senior faculty” who wrote “Time for a Change” — should have no input into addressing the problems.
I found myself wanting to contact the Daily News and other media to request that they indeed dive more deeply — specifically into establishing the level of involvement former WSU administrators perhaps had in creating the problems WSU now faces.
Elizabeth Siler
Pullman
