Voters in the Hutchinson School District have a school bond issue on their ballot for the second consecutive year. If that’s all someone knows about the bond proposal, it would be easy to think of it as a new version of the bond that voters rejected by a nearly 3-to-1 margin in 2025, but that would be a mistake.
It isn’t uncommon for voters to reject a school district’s bond proposal the first time, with the district refining the project and cutting out things that voters might view as luxuries before re-proposing the bond issue. That is not what USD 308 has done this year. The bond issue on the ballot is not simply a new, smaller version of the 2025 proposal, and it should be judged on its own merits.
The focus of the 2025 proposal was the construction of a new middle school for sixth, seventh and eighth graders, motivated by a desire to get away from the disruption that can be caused by students changing schools three years in a row at an important time in their development, when they are doing a lot of growing up.
Voters said loud and clear that they didn’t want to build a new school, and the school board took them seriously. The idea of a new middle school is entirely absent from this year’s bond proposal. Instead, USD 308 is attempting to mitigate the disruption of frequent school changes by having some staff join students as they move from HMS-7 to HMS-8, so students will see some familiar faces as they start eighth grade.
Instead, new construction is limited to additions at Allen STEM Magnet school and Graber and Wiley elementary schools, each including a gym that qualifies as a storm shelter, a band classroom, and a STEM classroom to clear up the scheduling logjam that results from having one gym that does triple duty as cafeteria and physical education and band classroom. A second gym in those schools would also put them on par with Faris, Lincoln-McCandless and Morgan elementary schools.
The rest of the proposed bond would go to things like roof replacements, HVAC updates, restroom updates, food service improvements, classroom renovations and more secure entrances.
The 2026 bond proposal is also much smaller than the 2025 proposal. At a total of $36 million to be repaid over 12 years, the current bond proposal is for about one-third as much money and half as much time. It would also keep the school district’s property taxes at their current level as the district’s 2006 bond issue ends, while the previous proposal would have raised taxes on a $100,000 house by about $60 per year.
No tax increase—like no new school construction—was something the school board heard from voters after the 2025 election, and the school board listened.
The bond question facing voters isn’t a rerun of 2025. It isn’t simply a revision with luxuries cut out. It isn’t version 1.1 of last year’s proposal. It is a whole new question, and deserves to be considered on its own merits.
Should USD 308 issue $36 million in bonds to do the projects it is proposing? That’s the question, not another referendum on the 2025 bond issue.
– The Hutchinson Tribune Editorial Board