Mark Belling vs. WB School Board on Referendum

How timely that the West Bend News did a half-page interview with one of our departing school board members! Don't think for a minute that Mike Weston didn't put in a final plug for the referendum....

DN: Like many other American school districts, ours is going through some difficult economic times, and obviously that will have a huge impact on any future referendum. I know the School Board delayed a planned referendum for right now. What’s going to happen if the school district doesn’t get that infusion of cash?

MW: We have to look at things like more trailers, larger class sizes, maybe different shifts, a second shift. We’d have to do something outside of the box to make up for it. Everybody wants the small class sizes because it’s shown that it’s better to educate the kids with smaller class sizes. So we want to maintain that, but I guess that’s what we’d have to do if we start getting more students, you’d have to have larger class sizes. We’ve got two trailers now, and we might end up having to put more trailers up.

DN: What are the pressing issues facing the schools right now, things that need to be addressed immediately?

MW: There is the ongoing building maintenance issues. There’s nothing that is an immediate danger or anything like that. When we did that $119 million referendum, the public said, “How did the buildings get like this?” And it was because we were always pulling money out of the maintenance budget. Now we’ve committed $1 million a year to start maintaining the buildings again.

MARK BELLING put a plug in for the West Bend Referendum, too....

"But none of this is deterring the greedsters who want to keep taxing you. They’ve been holding “house parties” in West Bend this month to plot support for another try at a school tax referendum. The last one got smoked by the voters but school boards believe that if at first they don’t succeed in raising your taxes, they should try, try, try, try again. In the real world people and businesses are showing enormous restraint as they try to survive this mess. In the fantasy world of government, they’re holding parties trying to tax those same people.

Can these clowns EVER give up? 2009 is NOT the year to be building schools or to be asking individuals, some of whom have been devastated by the housing and stock market collapses, to pay more in taxes. "