SCHOOL PLANNING

For more than a month, the Cape Girardeau Vision Planning Committee has held meetings throughout the community. The purpose was to solicit help from school district employees and patrons in laying the groundwork for district long-range planning.

A strategic plan for the school district is overdue, and the planning meetings were successful to the extent they will help bring about such a plan.

At the many meetings, participants made hundreds of suggestions. The committee compiled the suggestions and drafted a short list of the school district's most pressing needs. All the work has been done with an eye toward hitherto illusive school district funding.

What new and helpful information did the meetings generate? Very little.

New buildings are needed along with smaller class sizes. The district needs to improve classroom technology and equipment. The buildings also need air conditioning. Better communication and relations with the public and community trust in school district leadership are other needs.

These needs should surprise none of the school officials or community leaders touting the planning effort. Still, they say, it's important to give the public a voice in the process. Unfortunately, the majority of people attending the meetings were school district employees. Only 200 or so of the 600 to 700 total attendance represented the public.

Undaunted, Vision Planning Committee members point to a similar turnout for community meetings held earlier this year prior to passage of a tax measure to pay for street construction and repairs in Cape Girardeau.

Voters approved that tax in large part because they knew exactly on which streets their tax dollars would be spent. But it is much easier to make good use of a list of specific street projects -- essentially some engineering work, land acquisition, concrete and steel -- than to make practical use of a list of general and philosophical school district priorities.

The easy work is finished for the school district's planning process. Now the going gets tough. Any general talk of more and better facilities leads to the specific, and contentious, questions of how to pay for it.

There is no getting around the fact that the district will need more money if it is to realize some of the goals identified at the planning meetings. Unfortunately, the district hasn't had much luck passing a bond issue in recent years.

The Vision Planning Committee hopes to change that. Its series of meetings is a good-intentioned start. But committee members shouldn't become too preoccupied with analyzing the results of those meetings.

Instead they should look to the job ahead of them. Public interest in this issue didn't stop once the hearings ended. Nor has the difficulty of deciding how best to meet school district needs waned.

And so, after weeks of public meetings, now begins the difficult but necessary task of long-range school district planning.