FORUM: CANDIDATES DISCUSS BOND ISSUE

The proposed $25 million school bond issue drew much of the attention Thursday night at a forum for Cape Girardeau Board of Education candidates.

About 60 people turned out for the forum at the Central Junior High School cafeteria. The event was sponsored by the League of Women Voters.

The bond issue would enable the school district to build a new elementary school and middle school, construct an addition to Jefferson School, retrofit existing buildings to withstand earthquakes, and provide existing schools with air-conditioning and electrical system updates.

As a result, Washington, May Greene and L.J. Schultz schools would be closed.

Candidates John Campbell, Jack Sterrett and Kathy Swan said they support the bond issue; candidate Steven Wright said he has not decided whether to back the measure.

The measure would raise the property taxes for a median-priced Cape Girardeau house by $109.66.

"I'm not for or against," said Wright. "So many questions out there have not been answered," Wright said, enumerating the issues of new district boundaries and whether students will be bused.

"Parents need to know where their kids are going to school," he said.

Voters will go to the polls April 6 to elect three of the four candidates to the Board of Education and to decide the school bond issue. The new board will have seven members instead of the current six as the result of a law passed last year by the General Assembly.

Campbell, a CPA, and Swan, a businesswoman, are running for re-election to the board, although Swan has served only one year. She was elected last April to fill an unexpired term.

Sterrett, an associate professor of marketing at Southeast Missouri State University, is running for public office for the first time, as is Wright, the vice president of a bank.

Campbell said he backs the school bond issue wholeheartedly, pointing out that four citizens groups helped formulate the strategy that brought about the project.

"It's your plan," Campbell said.

Saying her ancestors provided her own parents and herself with good schools to attend in Cape Girardeau, Swan said it's time for the present generations to do the same.

Sterrett said he has visited most of the schools in the district in the past two weeks and is convinced of the need to do something about the facilities. "I challenge all citizens to peruse our schools," he said.

Sterrett presented a six-point action plan for his candidacy that included establishing a public relations program and foundation for receiving private donations.

He spoke of the need for a districtwide discipline policy (one is currently being considered by the board), and compared the physical condition of the city's schools to "sitting on a time bomb."

Campbell, who is completing his first three-year term on the board, said he helped the district accomplish its aims by participating in a painful round of budget-cutting. But he said there is more to be done.

"I want to finish the job we started."

Swan said her concerns are the same as when she ran for the board one year ago a health-issues curriculum and partnerships between the schools and both business and the community volunteers.

Swan said these partnerships can be "for the good of all of us."

In a press release handed out at the forum, Wright said his reservations about the school bond issue are based in part on the current undefined state of Missouri's school foundation formula.

The formula recently was declared unconstitutional, and the General Assembly is at work on a new one while the decision is being appealed to the state Supreme Court.

"I am troubled by the prospect of locally raised tax money being effectively redistributed throughout the state," Wright said.

Also speaking Thursday was Jim Limbaugh, the volunteer manager of the campaign to pass the school bond issue. Limbaugh said he doubted he could give the objective presentation of the project asked for by the League of Women Voters.

"I have to admit I have developed some passion toward this project," he said.

He showed photographic blowups of exposed gas and hot water pipes at Washington School and masonry problems at May Greene. "It's worn out," Limbaugh said of the latter school.

From the audience, retired former Central Junior High principal Fred Withrow challenged whether the school bonds will in fact cost $25 million. He suggested that fluctuating interest rates will increase the figure.

Limbaugh assured Withrow that the interest rates, which he said are at an all-time post-World-War-II low, would be fixed.

The total amount paid when the 20-year bonds are retired would be $43.1 million.