Voters approved a $68.95 million no-tax-increase bond issue, April 7, that will tangibly and sustainably affect the quality of education in Rockwood Schools and impact the lives of 21,351 students.

Prop 4 addresses four priority areas:

• Maintenance: better roofing, flooring, heating/cooling, playgrounds and parking lots and energy efficiency
• Safety: strengthen safety and security, like new knobs on door handles, to prevent intrusions and school tragedies 
• Technology and labs: update to support Science, Technology, Engineering and Math
• Tracks and fields: Install synthetic (turf) fields and replace tracks at all four high schools

With four points and $68.95 million dollars at stake, Prop 4 sounds expensive.

It is a lot of money, but the bond issue will not require an increase to the district’s current debt service tax rate (68 cents per $100 of assessed valuation of real and personal property). In concrete terms, for the average home owner in the district with a property value of $250,000, the annual tax rate is $2,243.90

Basically, tax payers’ annual tax expense will not increase nor decrease with Prop 4; instead, it will stay the same.

Prop 4 will be paid off with the current tax rate after approximately nine years.

Currently the district has dedicated 13 percent of its budget to facilities and maintenance.  Now much of that $26 million can be reallocated to other areas: curricula, teacher salaries, transportation, school support and administrators.

If voters had not passed Prop 4, the district would be in serious financial trouble.

Next year, the district needed around $7 million for technology just to maintain. If the bond had not passed, the district would have only had $500,000 for technology. That’s $6.5 million short.

Luckily, voters passed Prop 4 dedicating funds to install new tracks Rockwood’s buildings and technology will improve with new tracks, fields, labs and better building quality. With these additional funds, the quality of learning and athletics will advance with renovations and innovations.

The issues Prop 4 targets hit close to home.

The Homecoming game had to be held at Parkway Central, omitting not only the home-field excitement but also the Homecoming Court from the game just because EHS does not have turf fields.

In addition to the lack of excitement at our not-so-Homecoming game, the PTO lost income from concessions and door fees. In fact, EHS lost money because the school had to rent the turf field at Parkway Central and all the gate fees went to their PTO, according to information Superintendent Eric Knost’s shared with the EHS Superintendent Student Advisory Committee.

With PROP 4, every high school in the district will get turf fields, ensuring that this inconvenience does not happen.

The tracks are getting so worn out at EHS that the school almost could not hold a track meet, Dr. Knost said.

The locker rooms are too small to hold all the students who participate in athletics.  They are not big enough to accommodate the 1,959 people that have to take mandatory physical education classes. In fact, those locker rooms were built when EHS was a much smaller school serving only 10th-12th grades.

The science labs also cannot accommodate the demands of constantly-evolving science curriculum. The labs are in need of new equipment.

The Common Core Curriculum states that science classes must adapt a more interactive and lab-based teaching style. The science labs that EHS allows students to partake in labs about once a month, when students should be doing a few labs with every unit.

PROP4 has the potential to fix all of these things and more.