Why I'm not voting for the KISD Bond in November 2013

  Part III

  By Mary McGarr

In the series of soft sell press releases leading up to the 2013 bond call, KISD managed to assuage any fears by the public regarding the location of the new stadium and the number of seats required. They suggested that the location in Katy was precipitated by their fears that the residents of the southwest neighborhoods would complain about the noise, and City Of Katy residents would not! (I've heard plenty of complaints from Katy residents about the noise, the traffic during a football game and the smell of the buses.  Some Katy residents fear for their safety if they needed emergency services during a football game when there is all that traffic.) They justified the seating by vacillating between 12,000 and 16,000 seats and then settling for a 14,000 seat stadium. In the last few years of commentary leading up to this bond, the size has been for 12,000 seats, 14,000 seats and 16,000 seats. I would bet my hat that before it's all over, they will manage to have "saved" enough money somewhere to build a 16,000 seat stadium.

George Scott has provided a careful analysis of the actual need for a larger stadium for KISD football teams as well as the need for an additional stadium. His figures show us that the "need" is bogus and that it is more of a "want." There's a vast difference in those terms which seems to be lost on most people. Mr. Scott's premise is that they are counting people who aren't actually in attendance in order to come up with the numbers that they are using.

Other school districts with more students and more high schools than are in KISD operate with smaller or fewer stadiums than we already have. Ft. Bend ISD comes to mind. There's no denying that fact, but it's never mentioned. Ft. Bend has a large stadium, Mercer, and then the second stadium that is used is one at one of the high schools and is smaller. Schools that don't generate large crowds get to play there. There are eleven high schools in Ft Bend ISD. They play on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and seem to manage the UIL requirement concerning the five day business. It seems not to hurt students to have to play on Thursdays! KISD will throw out the thought that students need to be at home on a school night.  If that is the case, what about all the Junior Varsity, Freshmen and Junior High Students that are playing football every night of the week?  I guess they don't matter!

The other issue of WHEN do we need this new stadium "because of having a new high school" is also questionable. Tompkins High School opened the 2013-2014 school year with 832 students in the freshmen and sophomore classes. For the next two years, they will add a grade until 2015-2016 when they will have four grades. The capacity of the school is 3,000. Tompkins will not have a varsity level football program until the fall of 2015. If they have a varsity team before then, it will not have seniors on it, and it should NOT be competing at the Varsity level, in my opinion. Chances are, it will not be a very big football program for several years after that date. That's just the way these things work.

Our school district also is very good at creating numbers out of thin air. The superintendent and certain board members regularly claim that KISD is a "fast growth school district" (they pay handsomely to belong to an NGO (Fast Growth School Districts) that furthers that claim with the state legislature in order to con the legislators out of more tax dollars for such schools) when KISD hasn't been a fast growth school district in years. They want the public to "think" KISD is a fast growth school district.

To make the point, from 2004 to 2005 KISD grew by 2,522 students. From 2005 to 2006 KSID grew by 3,596. From 2006 to 2007 KISD grew by 2,917. From 2007 to 2008 KISD grew by 3,037. But since then, it's all been downhill--and all the while KSID administrators and board members throw around the statistic that KISD grows by 3,000 to 3,500 students each year, and that is simply not the truth. They are either lying and hope the public doesn't catch them, or they are too dumb to know the real numbers.  Take your pick.

From 2008 to 2009, KISD grew by 2,429 students. From 2009 to 2010 KISD grew from by 2,253 students. From 2010 to 2011 KISD grew by 1,816 students. From 2011 to 2012, KISD grew by 2,154 students. From 2012 to 2013 KISD grew by 1,835 students. From 2013 to 2014 KISD grew by 1,992 students. So that's down almost 2,000 students from the high growth of 2006 which was seven years ago! Funny how we never hear about THAT!!!

KISD tends to base its building plan needs on the projections of the retained demographer, Mrs. Guzman, who hasn't been right in her analysis very often over the years. In the recently mailed out Bond Proposal Flyer from KISD, it is stated that in 2010 there were 60,493 students, but in the 2006, Population and Survey Analysts' presentation, (Ms. Guzman's company) Ms. Guzman predicted there would be 62,279 students in 2010. So four years out, she's off by almost 2,000 students. That's a whole junior high school worth of kids! In fact at one of the bond committee meetings I attended in 2006, her lead representative Dr. Stacey Tepera (Mrs. Guzman wasn't in attendance), when asked, said that the projections that their company makes have a + or - 9% chance of being accurate! That means that Guzman's predictions could cause us to build a school we didn't need at all or not build one that was needed desperately! It is also interesting to note that in the recent KISD flyer, they are predicting in 2015 that there will be 69,826 students, but in 2006, Dr. Guzman told us that there would be 83,418 students by 2015! Surely it's obvious that these predictions are worthless and certainly not worthy of our basing the building of school facilities upon them.

And then there's the location that the District has tried to sell as the best possible location for a stadium. Go look at the July minutes for the school board and see where this stadium will be located. It's NOT right on the freeway where it should be; it's not where most of our high schools can get to it easily (except for KHS), and it's going to be a disaster to get to the site and out of it with four high schools descending on the area two nights at least every week in the fall of the year. Most schools coming to the stadium will be coming west on I-10, and there is a one lane turn off to get off the freeway either place, and traffic will be backed up for miles to the east. As I have already mentioned they have also put forth the notion that the people in the residential areas didn't want to have the noise. I'd like to know which "people" were polled to find out that "fact." Did anyone ask the residents of Katyland about the noise?

We will also have to see, once it's built, who gets to play in the fancy new stadium. Will it be based on a fair rotation through all of our high schools, or will the ones that have the most fans (and guess who that is) get to play there? Will KHS play only on Fridays and Saturdays, or will they, like Seven Lakes, get to play on Thursdays?

The local (in absentia) press should be getting into the use of Astroturf, the fact that we have 6 maybe 7 Astroturfed fields with stands at every high school, or perhaps the fact that instead of an unneeded stadium, we have thirteen junior high schools and four out of the 13 are already 659 students over capacity which means we need a new junior high in the immediate future. Katy Junior High has a capacity of 1,231 students but has 1,326 enrolled. Beckendorff Junior High has a capacity of 1400 but has 1,653 enrolled. Woodcreek Junior High has a capacity of 1400 but has 1,566 enrolled. Seven Lakes Junior High has a capacity of 1400, but has 1,545 enrolled. Where are the parents of these students? They should be demanding that a junior high be built before a stadium!!!

At the high school level where we have six high schools with full enrollment, Cinco Ranch (which was supposed to be relieved by Tompkins being built) has a capacity of 3,000 but this year has 3,185 students enrolled. Morton Ranch with a capacity of 3000 has 3,256 students enrolled. Seven Lakes which has a capacity of 3,000 has 3,597 enrolled. That's 1,038 total students over capacity for these three high schools! What will these schools be like next year?

Katy High School, where the population is manipulated to make sure their football team competes at the small school 5A level so they can win, has a capacity of 3,000 but has 2,931 enrolled.

And then we come to the trust issue. The administration has fudged about having a bond committee BEFORE they decided to float the bond, they've hidden the land deals, they've lied about why they want such a stadium in the first place, they've lied about how much money they need to build the things that are proposed, they've not told us why they are really moving the AG facilities (in my opinion, they aren't telling people that they just want more land to build more swanky offices for administrators so they need to clear out the AG facility that's on the ESC property), they've prevaricated about the need for the STEM facility (there's plenty of room in the unfinished portions of the Miller Career Center (that we built with the LAST bond) on the second floor for what they intend to do), they withheld information from the public about selling the football site at Tompkins High School and buying another land parcel for the same purpose from the Powerhouse Church, they've not done their due diligence, in my opinion, in finding a suitable architect for every project, they've lied about how many people actually go to football games at Rhodes, they've misled the public by suggesting that their taxes won't go up--THEY WON'T EVER GO DOWN EITHER!!! and when they have to float the next bond to build needed schools, the taxes WILL go up, and so on ad infinitum.

When they have some credibility, when they use an architectural firm that doesn't have employees who are in danger of losing their licenses, when they have the gumption to rezone areas that need to be rezoned, when they have a REAL committee with people who have no vested interest in the projects, then I'll be happy to vote for their bonds.

Right now it's NOT THIS BOND, NOT THIS YEAR.