Iron County School District Officials Make Case For Bond Passage

Utah law allows ballots for an upcoming election to be mailed by county clerks three weeks before the election date. And for us, that's today, and in our last conversation with Jon Whittaker, the Iron County Clerk, he indicated that they would be mailing the ballots starting today.

I took a glance at the “publication ballot” for the upcoming election and at the very end of that, there is a proposal from the Iron County School District asking voters to authorize a general obligation bond in the amount of $66 million.

Iron County School District Superintendent, Dr. Lance Hatch, along with Todd Hess, the CFO and Business Administrator for the district were on the radio with us this morning to explain the need for the bond.

Dr Hatch indicated that there is a need to expand some facilities in the district saying, “especially in our elementary schools. We've been able to address some of our issues at the high school level, the middle school level. But but at the elementary level, we have currently 350 students that spend their whole day in a classroom that's not in a building.” The facilities that those students are in have no restrooms or running water. According to Hatch the way to correct that is, “by constructing a a new elementary school.”

That school would be built in an area designated as one with high growth, and our guests indicated that at this time it looks like that area would be in the western part of the general Cedar City area.

And the new school would allow the district to, “change some boundaries across the whole district so that we can, you know, fill that new school and take the pressure off of the other schools so that they don't have kids in trailers.”

In addition to a new elementary school, funding from this bond would be used to build facilities for some of the alternative learning programs of the school district. Dr. Hatch explained, “we have a program called that we call sea Southwest Education Academy and it's a different way for the students to get their credits to be able to graduate. They have a huge success rate of graduating over 90% of the kids who, if they would have stayed in their regular high school, would have guaranteed to not graduate.” Also getting a facility would be Launch High School which according to the superintendent has students that, “want to learn in a way that's different. They want to learn their core subjects through projects, through building, through entrepreneurship. And that's the program that we call Launch High.”

As things are now, Southwest Education Academy can only have 60 students due to space limitations in a few trailors across from Cedar High School, and the Launch High School program has 200 students on the waiting list hoping to get into the program.

Hess explained to us how bonds work saying, “bonds are a way for local governments, municipalities, school districts to borrow money. The entity pledges property tax as collateral. on those bonds or as a way to pay for those bonds.” As to this particular bond Hess continued, “this is a general obligation bond. So really the the only guarantee of payment is the guarantee that those property taxes will be assessed every year in order to make those payments. And we can only assess enough property tax to make the payments each year. We can't collect more.” Other than a bond that was passed in 2021, all bonds of the school district have been paid off. Bonds are generally scheduled for a twenty year pay off period but are paid off ahead of time in some cases.

Dr. Hatch said he believes they have done their due diligence on this bond issue saying, “I think we've we've made a a lot of strides in helping the community to understand the need.” For those of you who would like to get more information, or have questions about the bond and the projects the district would like to finance, there will be a Town Hall meeting this Thursday, October 17^th at 5:30p.m. at the district offices on Royal Hunte Drive. You can attend in person, or watch it on Facebook Live.

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And, you can listen to our entire segment with Dr. Hatch and Mr. Hess in the podcast below.