Andre is indeed a great reporter and a great guy.

Ten years ago critics of measure Y said the following:

1. There is no plan of how to do the work

2. There is no long range strategic plan that takes into account projected demographic ebbs and flows for the PUSD and no plan for building use related to that.

3. The repairs will cost more than taking the schools down and starting from scratch.

4. This District has no plan ofr hiring its own project managers to overseee this.

5. It actually isnt enough money to do the whole job of repairing these schools to modern standards.

The PUSD attacked those critics, labeled them child haters, right wingers, conspiracy theorists, and worse, much worse.

Now they say they did Measure Y wrong and without admitting tehy were wrong, claim that all of the above five items were true in the case of measure Y, but give them more than double the money and they will do it right this time….

These are people who have been in teh education business ofr 125 years and have at least a 50% failure rate and have already failed in the last building boondoggel they did, completed only two years ago.

A yes vote is not a reasonable idea.

Of course, Steve Lamb is against a new PUSD bond. He was opposed to Measure Y and will apparently be opposed to any bond issue for PUSD regardless of who the is on the school board or who is running the district.

As a Marshall teacher and parent, I will say the Measure Y improvements to the aging campus buldings were significant but not enough. At least we have air-conditioning and we are ADA compliant. Had Measure Y failed, the kids and teachers in our district would be a lot worse off.

Measure Y was horribly managed and then the district closes two schools that RECEIVED money from a bond people are paying for and you wonder why Steve is against it??

There are two points from Mr. Leonard here:
1. I agree that Measure Y could have been managed a lot better. Our child was at Noyes when an incompetent contractor skipped town and left a mess. My colleague’s classroom at Marshall was soaked in a surprise September rainstorm, but that could easily have been prevented. However, none of this is an argument against funding basic school infrastructure; it is instead an argument in favor of better management of the entire process. The fact remains that a lot of important improvements were made thanks to Measure Y. Moreover, virtually every private school in this economically segregated district have made significant capital additions to their campuses in the last ten years or so. Don’t our kids deserve the same?
2. It’s true that PUSD closed a few elementary campuses after the Measure Y improvements were made, but these are still public school campuses (albeit charter) that kids in our community attend. Noyes Elementary, for example, has become a charter school and those kids still need a decent place to learn.