NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Hutchinson USD 308 Superintendent Dr. Dawn Johnson met with a small committee this past week to discuss the district's $109.5 million bond proposal. There is a state bond cap that comes into play.
"If you remember a few years ago sometimes you were counting your budget based on the current enrollment," Johnson said. "Now we've gone back so you can have predictability and use previous enrollments. When all that was happening and people were building also, it was hard for the state to predict their budget if they were going to have state aid that they weren't prepared for because of local district decisions on bonds, so they got to a place where they have a formula where they take retired principal plus the producer price index a weight way beyond kind of what I do for a living and then they come up with the amount each year that will go against the bond cap."
The amount for this year is a little over $593 million and about $330 million has been used.
"For a hundred and nine million, our cap number is somewhere around ninety million that we would use," Johnson said. "I believe that there are I think four schools being considered at the January school board meeting and for all four of those schools it exceeds the 263 million that is available left."
The committee Johnson met with will help the state board decide which of the projects to allow to go forward.
"They prioritize the the applications that are going forward on four areas, safety of current facilities so are the buildings unsafe for students to be in that's a real priority, imminent overcrowding, they'll go back and look at the last three years of enrollment growth and if there is imminent overcrowding and you have to build to do that. Impact of the delivery on educational services demonstrated by a restrictive and inflexible design, I think you know we've talked a lot about our middle school design and that's a piece that I think we'll have, and then energy usage operational inefficiencies, I think we have a little bit of that with two four-story buildings so that might be the area where we where we will definitely want to highlight where we run into that."
The largest piece of the bond, if approved, would build a new 6th through 8th grade center and repurpose the district's two current middle schools.