This provision of the Idaho Constitution is failing students. Will it ever be fixed? | Opinion
Andrea Nielsen has four kids in various stages of public schooling, from a recent graduate to an incoming 5th-grader, all in the Bonneville school district, which serves areas east of Idaho Falls.
She has a long history of involvement in her kids’ educations, from serving on PTO boards to volunteering in elementary school drama programs.
That hands-on experience, especially volunteering in classrooms, convinced Nielsen that the fast-growing district desperately needs another elementary school.
“You often have 30-plus kids in a classroom,” Nielsen said. “A teacher just can’t help every kid when a class is that large. So I think we’re losing some of the kids who are struggling.”
The district asked voters in May whether they would support a new school. A solid majority of the district cast ballots in favor. In fact, the election was a landslide, with nearly two votes in favor for every one against.
Nearly.
And for that reason, there is no new elementary school.
“It was super discouraging, but that supermajority gets us every time,” Nielsen said.
The proposal to build the elementary school using a $34.5 million bond needed the support of at least two-thirds of voters, per the Idaho Constitution. It came in less than 40 votes short of that threshold.
So, the district’s ability to provide a good education to students is endangered, as are schools across the state, by anti-democratic provisions in the state constitution.
Bonneville’s result was far from isolated. Three bonds failed in March despite winning majority support, according to Idaho Education News.
This consistent flouting of the will of the majority is due to Idaho’s highest-in-the-nation school bond supermajority requirement. As Idaho Education News reported in 2017, only Kentucky sets a similarly high bar, and there has been little interest from lawmakers in changing the requirement.
So school districts are left with few options other than trying the same thing again, as Bonneville is doing. Its board recently voted to re-run the bond election in August.
And there is some reason to think that things could go better this time. Turnout for the election was abysmal, with less than one in 10 eligible voters showing up at the ballot boxes. And the narrow failure of the bond in May might be just the kind of thing that will get more voters out to the polls.
Nielsen and other local parents are hoping that a rerun version of the bond, which the district board voted to put on the August ballot, will clear the high hurdle this time. Because if it doesn’t kids are going to start feeling the consequences of failing to build more schools to keep up with the quickly expanding population of Bonneville County — which grew by nearly 5% just between 2019 and 2020, according to Census data.
At a recent meeting, district trustees and Superintendent Scott Woolstenhulme examined what steps could be necessary if it can’t build a new elementary school. High on the list is ending all-day kindergarten to free up classroom space. And if things get bad enough, the district could consider returning to a hybrid learning model, where kids study online part-time and in classrooms the rest, which was last used during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A return to hybrid learning would be a disaster, Nielsen said.
“I think no one learned anything at the end of 2020,” she said. “It was really difficult. It’s really hard to keep the attention of younger kids especially.”
This is a situation Idaho’s communities should not be facing — especially with a surging economy, record budget surpluses and rapid population growth.
The state doesn’t provide sufficient funds to build schools, and it provides districts with only one real avenue to finance them: bonds. But the supermajority requirement means the will of the majority is often thwarted, and Idaho’s kids are consistently shortchanged.
And that will keep happening until the Constitution is changed.