The Aplington-Parkersburg School Board and administration will soon work to get feedback on the district’s failed general obligation bond election. The public measure asked voters if the district should issue general obligation bonds not to exceed $16,500,000 to renovate the Aplington building and to convert the high school into a grade 7-12 building.
Superintendent Travis Fleshner says the board recently discussed some possible reasons for the failed vote.
“One of the first things we really started with, and I started with too, was really thinking about process,” Fleshner says. “Was it the right project at the wrong time? Is it completely the wrong project? Was part of the no vote implication more so about property tax implications? Was it possibly about grade reconfiguring, particularly with Parkersburg Elementary, combinations of all of those things? So I think we really developed a pretty good laundry list of questions that we want to get answered before we move forward. And then we’ll be sending out a survey to all of our community members and we hope people will share that and reply to it. Whether people voted yes or voted no, if they could at least give us feedback as we move forward and do some future facility planning.”
Fleshner says the board will continue to discuss the needed facility updates and how to proceed.
“One of those really is how do we want to approach this? Do we want to reconvene our master facility planning team? Do we want to bring in an outside entity to kind of help guide that work? Is it the same group? Is it a different group? Do we want to even put this back out to a vote right away? As we shared in our messaging going through this, any kind of general obligation bond that has a property tax implication has to fall on a general November election. This isn’t like it used to be many years ago, we could just wait, you know, 90 or 120 days and rerun it. We have to wait till next November to do anything. So we’ve got a little bit of time to really think through what we want to do facility wise and where the voters fall on all that.”
Travis Fleshner interview:
