Tacoma voters need to carefully consider whether Prop 1 is worth it
Prop 1 will increase rents and may not necessarily improve learning. We need to reform not reward our schools.
Update: 3/3/24
Prop 1 Feb 13 passed: Out of 38,194 votes, 68.91% were in favor 31.09% were against.
In the voter’s pamphlet, no against statement was submitted. The pamphlet mentions “The Government Budgetary & Accounting Oversight Committee” and gives only one person’s name, Jay Doherty. The email for the Government Budgetary and Accounting Oversight Committee is Dullar_Billz@outlook.com. I called and spoke to an elections department representative who told me that the committee was in fact only that one person. There was nobody else on that committee. I cannot locate that person in Tacoma and no one answers emails at the dullar_billz@outlook.com account. I’m not sure Jay Doherty exists at this point.
The name Government Budgetary and Accounting Oversight Committee is a very official sounding name. I was mislead into thinking it was something official, but it was just one person who volunteered to be the committee. Doherty was cited in the News Tribune articles as the voice against the proposition. His comments centered around how liberal the schools had gotten.
The Tacoma School prop1 bond was never audited. I called and spoke to someone at the elcections department and asked why on the audit there were batches that had NO votes at all. He finally admitted that the audit was only of the Carbondale disctrict vote. Nobody had called for an audit of the Tacoma bond.
The elections board certified the vote at 10 am on Friday, February 23
The advertisements and yard signs told voters “Renew Our Commitment.” But this was a new commitment, not a renewal of an old bond. Misleading advertisement.
Why was the school district allowed to use its robocall system to call all the parents and remind them to vote after listing only the positive aspects of the bond?
Why was the school district allowed to expound on all the positive aspects of the bond in its website and ask people to vote?
The turnout was only 38,194. Our district has less than 30,000 kids.
My original article follows:
The cute signs for Prop 1 are popping up around Tacoma like wildflowers. "Renew our Commitment" they say. The truth is, this is a NEW $650 million bond (not including interest) that has nothing to do renewing the old bonds. We’re not renewing our commitment. We are adding NEW debt where it is not needed. Here are a few more things voters should consider before mailing in their ballot.
New facilities do not automatically equal improved learning
In a study called “Do School Facilities Matter? Measuring the Effects of Capital Expenditures on Student and Neighborhood Outcomes,” the authors found that “spending four years in a new school facility leads to a 0.1 standard deviation increase in standardized math scores and a 0.05 standard deviation increase in English-language arts (ELA) score.” Doesn’t sound like a huge increase to me.
The study’s authors admit that several other studies “find no or imprecise effects of capital expenditures on student achievement (see Cellini et al., 2010; Bowers and Urick, 2011; Goncalves, 2015; Martorell et al., 2016), while others find some evidence of positive impacts on student achievement, often only in reading and English-language arts (Welsh et al., 2012; Neilson and Zimmerman, 2014; Hong and Zimmer, 2016; Conlin and Thompson, 2017; Hashim et al., 2018).”
The authors also found this: “counterintuitively, students at newly constructed schools sat in slightly larger class sizes with less-experienced teachers and more disadvantaged students than at their old schools.”
Voters need to ask if a 0.1 standard deviation increase in math is worth $650 million. There are cheaper ways to improve student learning. For instance, give money to parents for showing up to parent-teacher meetings and volunteering in schools.
Increases in property taxes means increases in rent!
The argument for Prop 1 claims that the cost will be minimal and implies that only property owners will be impacted. So if you’re a renter, why not vote for it? Well, because the burden of these higher property taxes will be passed on to renters from landlords. “When property taxes increase, landlords may raise rental rates to cover the additional expenses. This means that renters may indirectly bear the burden of higher property tax.” Consider this: Property taxes in Tacoma total $415 million. TPS already gets 38 cents of every dollar from property tax at the expense of other programs.
BTW, did you realize that smaller landlords are selling to bigger companies and moving out of the city because only large corporations can afford the risk of dealing with the recently passed socialist-backed landlord tenant laws? These smaller landlords are less likely to raise rents because it’s not their main source of income. Rather than helping renters, the strict landlord tenant laws end up hurting renters in the long run.
$650 Million Could solve a lot of other problems
Many students at TPS qualify as homeless under the Mckinney Vento Act. Helping families get out of poverty would do more to improve student success than new buildings and better WiFi. We could spend the money on solving the homeless problem and increasing security. Tacoma residents don’t feel safe. Log into Nextdoor and you’ll see everyday Tacomans posting videos of porch pirates stealing their packages, pictures of their cars that were stolen, pictures of vandalism to their homes. You’ll see posts asking others if they heard gunshots down the street. Are new school buildings going to solve these problems? TPS should prioritize and replace the buildings one at a time, not all at once. Let us focus on fixing our community. That will help kids more than anything.
You and I still owe 1.2 billion on TPS’s other bonds
Tacoma still owes $897 million dollars on the principal on previous bonds plus another $328 million on the interest, so we still owe over 1.2 billion. Now they want another $650 million. I'd feel better if we payed some things off first. https://www.tacomaschools.org/about/bond
The rich get richer but do schools get better?
If you don’t know how a bond works, you might take a few moments to do some research. Ididn’t really know anything about this until now. As I understand it, the government sells an IOU in the form of municipal bonds to investors. You and I, the property owners and renters, are forced to pay back those bonds whether we voted for them or not. Even people who send their kids to private schools have to pay. We are the guarantors on this loan. So voters need to ask the following questions:
What is TPS's credit rating? If our credit rating isn’t good, we will have a higher interest rate. If it’s a high interest rate, it means you and I are paying a lot more so that the investors can make money.
Is this a good deal for taxpayers? Does the $650 million include the interest we will be paying to the wealthy investors? If not, what will the total cost of the bond? If it’s like a home mortgage, the interest could be as much as the principal or more. For instance, if you borrow 300K at 5% over 30 years, you will have actually paid $579K for the house. What rate will we be paying?
Sure, some property values will go up with the newer school buildings. But that too will lead to increased rents and mortgage payments. (I may be wrong about some of this in this section. Please correct me if I am.)
Is TPS a good steward of its money already?
Does TPS deserve to get this money? Did TPS apply for “state match dollars”? If so, was it rejected or accepted? Why?
TPS received $221,300,640 in ESSER funds. Some of that money could have gone to projects proposed in Prop 1. Did it? Where did that money go? https://oese.ed.gov/files/2021/03/FINAL_ARP-ESSER-FACT-SHEET.pdf
The bond is just too big and should be broken up
Many of the projects should not be included in a Bond but are better suited for a levy. Bonds are for Capital improvements. Furniture and maintenance work should be done through capital levies. I'm not even sure sneaking extra stuff like this into a bond is legal. This is too big of a bond with too many moving parts. Tacoma should focus on only the schools that need replacing for a bond initiative. Narrow it down. Make do with what we've got for now. https://www.esd112.org/bond-levy/
We don't have enough information to vote yet.
The "central kitchen" idea is just an idea. They don't even know where it will be yet. How can they project costs accurately if they haven't so much as determined a location?
Besides, didn't we learn anything from Michelle Obama? Her first initiative was healthy foods in schools. She pretty quickly realized that there was too much push back from Big Food, so she switched to "Get out and move." The idea is a good one in theory, but sourcing local foods, etc. ain't easy. It fails everywhere it's been tried. Have they figured this out yet, how it's going to work? Show me the numbers.
I respect the desire to provide wholesome food to our kids. But ask any cafeteria worker. They’ll tell you very few of the students take advantage of the salad bar. They throw away more apples than they eat. A majority of the healthy food is trashed and the processed food is scarfed down. When my kids were in school, we made them lunch everyday because we wanted them to eat healthy. Not every parent can afford that. But maybe if we spent our money more carefully, we could support those who need food supplement. But let kids whose parents can afford it pay for their food. We don’t need to give free lunch and breakfast to all kids. TPS is in the business of education. Parents are in the business of raising their kids.
Another example of not enough information is that the bond claims TPS will provide "access to an expanded career and technical education facility that focuses on agricultural sciences and wildlife studies to give students more paths to grow and learn." Do we know what that means? Where is this technical ed facility that focuses on agricultural sciences?
TPS needs to go back to the drawing board and give us specifics. Decide what they're going to do, then ask us for money. Prop 1 is half baked and the public has not been given enough time to consider this proposition.
Will our children will be saddled with the debt?
If you have children in TPS, they will have already graduated by the time these buildings are finished. But we will still be paying for it 25 years from now. What will schools look like at that time? Will we even need buildings? Why can’t TPS do more creative things like SAMI and SOTA. SAMI met in portable buildings while my kids were there. Despite the poor buildings, my kids are successful graduates with degrees from Wash U St. Luis, UPS, and soon to be UW Seattle and Johns Hopkins. They didn’t have fancy buildings in high school.
SOTA is making use of office space in downtown Tacoma. There are plenty of vacant buildings that could be used for schools. Why not rent those out and help the local economy in that way? Did TPS look into this possibility?
Our schools need to be reformed not rewarded
Washington state’s constitution guarantees kids a right to education “free from secterian influence or control.” It’s fair to say that left-leaning influence of the teacher’s unions and other socialist organizations constitutes sectarian influence.
Teachers need to be educators, not activists. We need to root out the sectarian ideologies that are ruining our schools and focus on high quality education. TPS boasts a 95% graduation rate, but what does that mean? I know 7th and 8th graders who can’t add or subtract. How many of them actually know their times tables?
Our middle school libraries have a wide selection of LGBTQ titles, but can you find any access to academic databases like ERIC or CQ Researcher? Can you find classic novels, like Brave New World, Farenheith 451 or 1981? We have outsourced our libraries to Sora by Overdrive…which is invested heavily by venture capitalist groups like Blackrock, which are the ones pushing DEI on everyone.
It’s time we focus on academics, not activism. Teach our kids to think. Protect their innocence. Give them our best. Tighten our belts. Make due with what we have. Don’t just throw money at the problem and hope new buildings will make them better people. Studies show they won’t. As the Taiwanese like to say, “A cow in Beijing is still a cow.”
It’s hard to imagine this bond not passing since none of these cons were ever discussed anywhere. The public needed real reporting on this issue. But our media failed us again.
I tried to write something but got ignored by TNT. If one side is always censored, we cannot possibly have free and fair elections.
Vote NO on Prop 1.