wherein Liz votes in the ICSD elections
May. 17th, 2011 10:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingThe Ithaca City School District (ICSD) elections were held from 12-9pm today. Coincidentally, I was scheduled to work from, yes, 12-9pm. So yesterday I told PM that I intended to vote, and would it be better for me to come in late or take an extra long break? She said to come in late.
My polling place is an elementary school that is just a few blocks from my house (and actually only a block out of the way on my route into town for work), so getting there was simple. I arrived at a minute past noon, just as the workers were getting set up, and was the third person on their books.
In fact, I was there so early that they hadn't gotten the fancy-schmancy ballot scanning machine to work yet.
*headdesk*
The machine seemed to be on, but it refused to suck in ballots that were held to the intake slot. A couple of the workers ran through the diagnostic program, which reported that everything was working properly -- though that clearly was not the case. One worker then called for help and was told that, since no ballots had yet been read, she should press a menu button to re-open the poll. That finally worked.
Except, of course, by then the first person on the books had gotten fed up and left since he had to get to work. School elections have depressingly low voter turnout anyway, so that's doubly unfortunate. :-(
Anyway, there were three voting items in this election. First, five people were running for three slots on the Board of Education. Second, the school budget was up for approval. Third, the Board wants to appropriate money from a capital reserve fund to pay for various large building maintenance projects and to buy new busses and maintenance department vehicles.
The ICSD runs a yearly budget slightly over $100,000,000. This year's was more or less in line with last year's -- though I really wish the informational budget proposal mailing they sent out had broken it down in more detail and explained the reasons behind the mild rejiggering of the balance between various budget elements. A rejected budget would trigger revisions that would start cutting important programs, plus a second election that would cost around $30,000 to run. So I voted in favor.
I also voted in favor of the capital fund appropriations. You see, I worked at the ICSD maintenance department for a month or so back in late 2004, and I can tell you that there is never enough money in the budget for maintenance. And maintenance is not something you can skimp on! When a window breaks, or a sidewalk becomes a safety hazard, you can't just shrug and say, "Oh, sorry, no money, suck it up and deal." You have to fix it. And things break or go wrong all the time. It is just the way the world works. So while I am not necessarily in favor of expansions, I am always in favor of things like repairing entryways and sidewalks, fixing middle school bathrooms, and replacing old flooring at elementary schools. They need to be done.
You cannot argue with broken radiators. You can only fix them or not, and I fall on the side of not letting school buildings turn into junkheaps.
I also picked three candidates for the Board of Education, mostly based on the interviews they all did with the Ithaca Times, which is Ithaca's free weekly newspaper. After reading those articles, I marked one person definitely to vote for and one person definitely not to vote for, after which I had the hard task of choosing two people from the remaining three candidates. Last night I decided definitely to vote for one, and left the other two in abeyance until I had the ballot in front of me and made a more or less random choice based on which one I felt more charitable toward at that particular moment. Not the most scientific way to vote, but I thought they both had good points and couldn't really weigh them against each other to any firm conclusion. *shrug*
Ah well, presumably it will all work out in the end.
My polling place is an elementary school that is just a few blocks from my house (and actually only a block out of the way on my route into town for work), so getting there was simple. I arrived at a minute past noon, just as the workers were getting set up, and was the third person on their books.
In fact, I was there so early that they hadn't gotten the fancy-schmancy ballot scanning machine to work yet.
*headdesk*
The machine seemed to be on, but it refused to suck in ballots that were held to the intake slot. A couple of the workers ran through the diagnostic program, which reported that everything was working properly -- though that clearly was not the case. One worker then called for help and was told that, since no ballots had yet been read, she should press a menu button to re-open the poll. That finally worked.
Except, of course, by then the first person on the books had gotten fed up and left since he had to get to work. School elections have depressingly low voter turnout anyway, so that's doubly unfortunate. :-(
Anyway, there were three voting items in this election. First, five people were running for three slots on the Board of Education. Second, the school budget was up for approval. Third, the Board wants to appropriate money from a capital reserve fund to pay for various large building maintenance projects and to buy new busses and maintenance department vehicles.
The ICSD runs a yearly budget slightly over $100,000,000. This year's was more or less in line with last year's -- though I really wish the informational budget proposal mailing they sent out had broken it down in more detail and explained the reasons behind the mild rejiggering of the balance between various budget elements. A rejected budget would trigger revisions that would start cutting important programs, plus a second election that would cost around $30,000 to run. So I voted in favor.
I also voted in favor of the capital fund appropriations. You see, I worked at the ICSD maintenance department for a month or so back in late 2004, and I can tell you that there is never enough money in the budget for maintenance. And maintenance is not something you can skimp on! When a window breaks, or a sidewalk becomes a safety hazard, you can't just shrug and say, "Oh, sorry, no money, suck it up and deal." You have to fix it. And things break or go wrong all the time. It is just the way the world works. So while I am not necessarily in favor of expansions, I am always in favor of things like repairing entryways and sidewalks, fixing middle school bathrooms, and replacing old flooring at elementary schools. They need to be done.
You cannot argue with broken radiators. You can only fix them or not, and I fall on the side of not letting school buildings turn into junkheaps.
I also picked three candidates for the Board of Education, mostly based on the interviews they all did with the Ithaca Times, which is Ithaca's free weekly newspaper. After reading those articles, I marked one person definitely to vote for and one person definitely not to vote for, after which I had the hard task of choosing two people from the remaining three candidates. Last night I decided definitely to vote for one, and left the other two in abeyance until I had the ballot in front of me and made a more or less random choice based on which one I felt more charitable toward at that particular moment. Not the most scientific way to vote, but I thought they both had good points and couldn't really weigh them against each other to any firm conclusion. *shrug*
Ah well, presumably it will all work out in the end.
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(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-18 04:43 am (UTC)tl;dr - I think it has to do with differences in funding sources and methods
Date: 2011-05-19 02:39 am (UTC)It is kind of an odd was to run things, from some perspectives, but I think it is based on the notion that if schools are paid for out of local property taxes, then local property owners ought to have some say over what their money is being used for. Since California has such strict property tax caps and school funding is pretty much all centrally distributed from Sacramento (that is how it works out there, right?), local property owner approval becomes much less relevant.
What makes me sad is that school district elections consistently have appalling voter turnout. The city of Ithaca has a resident population of 30,000, of which somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 are likely registered voters. The turnout for this election was approximately 2,500 -- somewhere between ten and thirteen percent. And then people wonder why the school systems are doing things they don't like with no sense of accountability!
Voting is not just a right. It is a responsibility and a duty. I wish more people thought of it that way. (Also, I figure that if I don't vote, I lose complaining rights until the next election. I rather like complaining about things, so. *wry*)