I used to work for a program focused on one thing; reviving dying Kansas towns. Whilst working for this program we traveled all over Kansas touring everything from big cities to towns on the verge of becoming unincorporated. I also spent 2 years lobbying to Federal and State legislatures on behalf of education and from my experience I tell you now we cannot afford to fail this bond issue.
While working with dozens of Kansas towns, our program identified two top factors for driving a town's population growth, and that is school retention and school enrollment. Currently four of our schools in the city are over capacity, meaning we can not accept any more children into our school system that are already enrolled. The first issue with this has to do with overcrowding. Families will begin sending their children to other schools, possibly moving, in order to find schools that fit their needs. Secondly, statistically speaking, we see schools that fail multiple bond issues see a decline in city population, stagnant industry growth, dropped school classifications (which USD 489 already has) and lower test scores. Whilst schools that pass bond issues see population growth, higher retention, and increased post-secondary success.
School bond issues are also shown to increase citizen retention, meaning those that leave for higher education, work relocations, or other moves, are more likely to return at a later point in their life. The biggest cause of population decrease in the state of Kansas is a lower quality rating in their schools. And in fact, towns that lose schools have an increased chance of becoming unincorporated.
This bond is an investment, not just in our youth, but the entire city. Higher school retention means more children are moving onto higher education, while also returning back to Hays after school. Communities with an increase of educated individuals almost directly relate to economic expansion and population growth. The economy grows in direct correlation with educated individuals per capita.
A failed bond would mean Hays is functioning at full capacity in terms of education. This means no one else would be moving here, bringing new business, bringing new opportunity, bringing new ideas. Hays could possibly suffer more in terms of economic stability if we fail to bring new economic participants into our community vs what we would pay as a whole for the entirety of the bond. Our economy is strictly limited by the number of participants within the marketplace, meaning the less people that live here and move here, the smaller our economy will be.
Judging by the “Grow Hays” initiative, revitalizing downtown, our outreach programs, and our municipality improvements, I would say growing and strengthening our community is very important to our city.
My final point has to do with generational giving. Our grandparents established the schools that our kids use today. This was an amazing gift they handed to the youth of our community. The generation that paid for the schools never once stepped foot in them as a student and never would, but they collectively decided to do better for their kids. It is our turn. We have schools that don’t have handicap accessibility, not enough classrooms, and HVAC systems that go out in February that required students to wear parkas in the classroom. We appreciate and are highly thankful for what those generations did for us, now it is time for us to pass that on to our future generations. This bond puts us on pace with the standard of education in our country to keep us from falling behind, stagnating, and failing.
Brent Hirsch, Hays