Letter: Vote ‘yes’ to referendum issues

To the Editor:

I would like to urge everyone to vote yes and yes on the upcoming school district referendum.

There are so many reasons to vote for this.

If you have children, grandchildren, nieces or nephews, you obviously want them to have the best educational opportunity that they can.

If you are an employer, you want to be able to attract skilled, intelligent people to the community. Also as an employer you want youth with a strong educational background coming out of the school system.

As a taxpayer you want businesses to be attracted to the community, and you want skilled professionals attracted to the community able to share in the tax burden.

The consequences of neither question passing would be catastrophic. No matter what your political persuasion is, it’s hard to argue this.

Given the class sizes we have today, the mere possibility of losing up to 38 teachers makes me shudder.

It’s unfortunate that the district has gone into operating debt and that the previous referendum did not break even at the end. We can’t afford to “punish” the district going forward because of that.

In an era where 90 percent of the state’s school districts must have local referendums just to cover basic needs, it’s obvious that something is broken.

I would urge everyone to try to elect state representatives that recognize the severity of the situation and that something needs to be done at the state level and soon about this looming problem.

I have avidly watched the School Board meetings during this process and I trust that they have reasonably, in good faith, and with fiscal prudence taken into account the necessary factors into their model, and that the budget will break even at the end of the proposed referendum period.

Again, I urge everybody in the community to vote YES to both questions.

Peter Gross

Red Wing

Tags: opinion, letter, peter, gross, school, referendum