By JAMES BELL
Hays Post
As the Hays USD 489 Board of Education works to finalize details of a proposed bond election, the administration is set to begin a massive communication campaign to inform residents of exactly what the $94 million price tag will include.
“Right now, we are working on and have a calendar of town hall meetings,” said Superintendent Dean Katt.
The meetings will include a tour of the individual district buildings along with a presentation of the overall bond issue.
“The outline of the meetings is to do the tour, do an overall bond election update of the dollar amount, where it goes, what each building would get and then come back and focus on that building’s needs,” Katt said. “The main focus, obviously, in every building that we look at is security and safety, two of the big issues that we have and have a great need to do a better job for our kids.”
Meetings are also being planned for civic and business organizations and anyone interested can request a presentation.
“Anyone that wants us to come or anyone to come and talk about the bond issue we would be more than welcome to set up a meeting,” Katt said.
Presentation materials are also being readied that will be available on the USD 489 website. In the meantime, Katt encourages questions about the bond to his office.
“Feel free to call and ask questions … if you want information, whatever it may be,” he said.
To help in getting the information out to the public, volunteers are being sought to spread bond details.
Meetings for volunteers to join committees are set for 5:30 p.m. Monday in the Hays Middle School cafeteria and 6:30 p.m. Wednesday in the Hays High lecture hall.
While the administration has taken many questions from the public about the bond, Katt said comments to him have been positive and curious rather than completely against the bond.
“What I hear going to the schools has been very, very positive,” he said. “Publicly, people don’t say a whole lot of negatives to me. … They have questions.”
Those questions are exactly what the meetings are set to address.
“I think we can inform the public, and they can make an informed decision when we have the election,” he said.
A lot of the questions, Katt said, center around the amount of the bond and why it is better to complete the project in one pass, rather than break the work up.
Outside of questions to the administration, many residents have questioned the bond in light of recent Hays National Education Association contract negotiations with the Board of Education – specifically why the district is considering such a large facilities project while teachers have remained locked in their vertical pay scale for years.
Even though bond money cannot be used to fund salaries, Katt said the frequent maintenance currently needing to be undertaken due to aging facilities affects the amount of money available for salaries and classroom supplies.
“Right now, the way our budget is with capital outlay, we’re trying to budget accordingly and make changes as we go, but we’re always financing these things for three, four, five years,” he said. “If the bond issue passes, we are not going to have to continually have two or three lease payments or payments coming out of capital outlay — that means some of the other money is freed up.”
Katt was quick to caution, however, that voting for the bond would not guarantee money would become available for salary purposes.
“I don’t want to give anybody the impression that if they vote for this your going to get a big raise because of it,” he said.
Uncertainty around the state budget also makes any future capital movement hard to ascertain, but overall maintenance is taking a much larger share of funds that would not be necessary if the bond were to pass.
“There are things we can do that would free up some money if we didn’t have our capital outlay budget so tight now just doing infrastructure,” Katt said.
The first meeting is set for 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 4 at O’Loughlin Elementary.