Opinion by Samuel Strait – November 3, 2024

I suppose most of the County have received the slick new hustle by the local school district citing what they will do with the $59 million general obligation bond that appears on the November 5th ballot.  Nothing specific, nor anything beyond lobbying for things that should be routine maintenance.  A long list of those that have much to gain, either by their affiliation with the school district or are associated with it in some fashion.  One only hopes that those who will bear the burden of this massive tax hike for the next thirty to forty years will come out in opposition to this obvious grift on the part of our local school district.

This is a district that has experienced significant loss of its student population over the last few years, and expects the decline to continue as long as residents continue to be taxed and priced out of their homes and the County.  Not only has the school district’s student population declined but so has the County’s.   This state is unlikely to change anytime soon.  For such a repository of our supposed best and brightest, well compensated as well, it mystifies those of us who pay attention, what exactly is the school district’s motivation for maintaining eleven school sites and the continuing desire to hire more employees when the need no longer exists. 

Loss of those students it is meant to educate should mean less need for teachers, administrators, support staff, and school sites, realizing significant savings for the district to enable it to cover all the “advertised needs” shown on its flashy colored mailers without resorting to the continuing burden being placed on those that can least afford it. 

This is the fantasy world that the well funded school district lives in.  It is impossible for them not to recognize the strain Measure H will place on already burdened local citizens, yet the school district continues to play the card that their needs are “more important than yours”.

If the district was not already sitting on millions of unspent dollars accumulated during the Covid years that must be spent on additional hires, I am not sure how they can make the asinine case that they are concerned about school site conditions.  Nothing like being employee and school site rich, and have the audacity to claim “poor us”.  When you couple this ridiculous claim with that of, the many district employees that have nothing to do with the education of its student population, the School Bond becomes a massive overreach by yet another taxing authority, the Del Norte Unified School District.

It is now only a few days before the vote is to be taken and it is my hope that those still with ballots to cast will vote NO on Measure H.  It is enough that locally the taxpaying public has become a target for every taxing authority in the County based on a bare majority of 55% and the promise of an oversight committee.  An oversight committee that was a laughing stock for its role in the 2008 school district bond.  We have since discovered that promises made over the last couple of decades were not kept by the school district in 2008 and will not be kept in this version of school district robbery.  Education in the school district can’t get much worse. Students are fleeing, and it makes no sense to continue such a travesty.  Buttering the school district’s bread will not change its direction from the train wreck it has become.

VOTE NO ON MEASURE H !!!!