School proposal defeated
This is a depiction of the old Pittsburg High School, later adapted to become Pittsburg Community Middle School. The preservation of the current school’s external architecture formed a key selling point of the “Vote No” campaign on a recently defeated $67.6 million bond proposal. (Photo adapted from okielegacy.net)
BY MARCUS CLEM | Hometown Girard
USD 250 Pittsburg Community Schools will need to find a new plan to revamp its middle school and pay for maintenance and construction work at its five other buildings.
57.89 percent of voters voted No in an election where 5,158 voters, or about 44 percent of those registered in the school district, participated. This is dramatically higher than a typical local election where no state or national candidates are on the ballot and represents a success for Crawford County’s mail-in ballot system.
The election results are not yet finalized but because each mail-in voter had to be definitively registered in order to participate, there are no reported provisional ballots to canvas and the unofficial count is unlikely to change.
Superintendent Destry Brown posted a message on the Facebook Page for the “Invest in Yes” campaign, formed to promote the $67.6 million bond proposal.
“I am proud of the number of people who participated in the election. We wanted this to be a community decision and the community has spoken,” Brown said. “After spending more than two years getting input from the community, we thought we had the right plan. We will continue to enlist the help of our community to determine a plan the community can support in the future, and then determine the best plan of action to put the plan into place.”
A similar statement did not appear on the “Vote No on school bond” page, but a comment left by one of its organizers, Stuart Owsley, said the bond “[put] the cart before the horse.”
“Narrow vision and deaf ears are never friends of the educational process,” he wrote.
An older statement from the campaign itself discussed its reasons for opposition.
“Ask yourself this, if this plan was right for our community, for our kids, why has our school district felt it needed to spend so much money, mostly taxpayer money to convince us that it is? The right plan would almost sell itself,” the campaign said in the statement. “It is a poorly planned boondoggle that will cost us, our children and our grandchildren.”
A print version of this story with up-to-date comments from each campaign will appear in the next Hometown Girard print edition of Feb. 12.