Wahluke superintendent discusses levy failure

MATTAWA — After Wahluke School District’s capital levy failed to pass following the Feb. 13 vote, Wahluke Superintendent Andy Harlow said the district will likely soon have to cut $1.5 million from its budget.

"Knowing how many staff just on our campus had voted, community members, and then with our additional high school seniors, we thought the election would be a little closer and that's why we chose to run this again,” Harlow said. 

The levy would have been used to pay for needed HVAC upgrades the district implemented last year at Mattawa Elementary and Wahluke High School. Harlow said the district had to take out a loan for the $2.7 million project, which had been pushed off for about 10 years. 

“We made about $2 million in cuts last year, (cutting) over 25 staff,” he said. “We’re probably set to make another $1.5 million in cuts, so probably another 10 to 15 staff will be cut and the facilities, they don't get done and the loan that we took out for the HVAC, we'll just continue to pay on.”

Harlow said the district is still waiting for one more vote count, but said the levy would need a significant number of yes votes and likely won’t pass. 

“We've run four levies. The first one, two years ago, failed, and then we ran it again in February … and that passed,” Harlow said. “Then we thought, ‘Man, we need to have something long-term to start paying off some of this debt. Plus, we have some facility issues that need (fixing) right now’ … We have over 100 kids in our track program, but we couldn't even host districts because of all the cracks (in the track).”

The levy would have paid for replacing the WHS track, resurfacing the district tennis courts and adding lights to the WHS soccer field. Harlow said the facility upgrades are meant to benefit the community and help keep kids engaged in programs rather than carrying out bad behavior.

“We heard, ‘Hey, if you just were paying for the HVAC, I’d vote for it, but adding in these extra lights and things like that, those just felt like extras and they're just for sports.’ Where we took that from, was all the things the community wanted because it was a partnership; they get to use the tennis court, they get to use the track,” Harlow said. “On any given night, we probably have 10-15 people walking on our track, so we thought it was a win-win. But a lot of people struggled with this whole idea of sports and it was so much bigger than that, but It just got lost. This was not just for our sports, it was for our community as well.”

The district has yet to make any evaluations or decisions regarding how they will approach the levy or other levies in the future, Harlow said.

“The problem is that our district, this is what they've done for the last 15 years. Instead of ever getting ahead and making a plan, we’re just always robbing Peter to pay Paul and never getting out of this hole,” Harlow said. “I feel really encouraged with the cuts that we've made over the last year, our change in process and actually developing a long-term strategic plan over the next 10 years. We're on the right track, we were just hoping that this levy would help get us moving in the right direction, so it's definitely going to pull us down and then we have to figure out what to do, because these loans aren’t going to go away, and the needs aren't going to go away.”

Harlow said about 75% of Wahluke staff can’t vote in the levy election, either because they commute from out of town or have Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration status and are not eligible to vote. Additionally, In the past two elections, a significant number of “no” votes came from the Desert Aire community, he said.

“We've done an outstanding job of getting ahold of our spending and getting ahold of creating better processes and systems, working on a long-term plan; that stuff is great,” Harlow said. “I don't know if we've been able to make that case to (the Desert Aire community) … I think there's a group that doesn't understand that there's over 400, nearly 500 kids that come from Desert Aire.”

“I just think when these things fail, the first thing is this you question yourself and your team, ‘Are we doing the right things? Are we making things, in fact, better?'” he said. “That's something that we continue to work with, myself included and I hope, in the end, that people feel that we are doing a lot to make it better. I just don't know, to be honest, how many more cuts we're going to be able to make … At some point, the kids are going to start to suffer.”

Gabriel Davis may be reached at gdavis@columbiabasinherald.com. Download the Columbia Basin Herald app on iOS and Android.

    Wahluke School District Superintendent Andy Harlow speaks about the district’s capital levy at the South Grant County Candidate Forum hosted in October at Wahluke High School.
  

    Exterior of Wahluke High School, one of the schools that required an update to its HVAC system last year. The Wahluke School District’s most recent levy, which failed to pass, would have gone toward paying off the loan for that project.
 File photo   

    A Wahluke student plays in a soccer match on Wahluke High School’s soccer field, which would have received overhead lights if the school district’s most recent levy had passed. The lights would allow play in the evenings.