Residents in the Bryant School District voted against a millage increase during a special election Tuesday that would have funded the construction of two schools and the expansion of others.
The complete but unofficial results were:
For ................................... 988 Against ......................... 1,504
“We are disappointed in the results of the election,” district Superintendent Randy Rutherford said in a statement. “Our schools are the biggest reason people move to Bryant, and we expect enrollment will continue to increase. Adequate funding is essential to our ability to provide students with the facilities and educational resources they need and deserve.”
The increase would have raised the rate by 4.7 mills, to 41.9 mills. The district’s current 37.2 mills is the lowest of the four districts in Saline County, and the increase would have placed the district on par with neighboring Benton School District.
A mill is a tenth of a cent. The millage increase would have cost an owner of a $100,000 house an additional $94 a year.
School officials have said the increase was needed to help the district keep pace with a growing student population, but some who opposed the increase said the district should explore other means to address the growth spurt.
Bryant resident Hamid Pezeshk said he tried to push people to get out and vote in the special election.
“My main concern was not my personal opposition of building the schools and expanding the schools,” he said. “My biggest opposition was how they tried to hide this tax.”
Pezeshk said the district did the bare minimum in letting residents know about the special election - taking out an advertisement in the Saline Courier. The district had several ways to disseminate the information, he said, but officials chose not to.
“It’s common courtesy,” he said. “It’s common respect.”
The increase would have paid for a new elementary and a new middle school, additions to Collegeville and Davis elementary schools and what is currently Bryant Middle School, and district wide technology upgrades. Had the measure passed, the district also planned to expand fine-arts facilities at the high school and build a physical-education facility there.
With some 250 new students enrolling each year, officials projected the district would have 10,737 students by the 2017-18 school year, district spokesman Devin Sherrill has said. The district doesn’t have enough classroom space to handle the growth, she said.
Election officials had prepared Tuesday for sheriff’s deputies to take poll workers to the voting sites in case the area received ice or snow, but it wasn’t needed, Saline County Clerk Doug Curtis said.
“Thank goodness we did dodge that bullet,” he said.
The election ran smoothly, he said, except for about 120 voters who went to the wrong polling site because of an error in the Saline Courier. There isn’t any way to know whether the voters then went to the correct precinct, Curtis said.
“I hope they did,” he said. “It’s so disheartening to me that people go there to vote and they’re at the wrong precinct. We want to get the vote out as much as we can.”
The district plans to ask voters for another millage increase next year, but will go back to the School Board first, which will then make a decision on how to move forward with the next request, Sherrill said.
“We knew the millage increase was going to be a difficult measure to pass, but with our unprecedented growth we felt that we had to ask the voters to help fund new facilities for our students,” Rutherford said in the statement.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 02/12/2014