KELLY DISTRICT LOOKING FOR SOME DIRECTION

It's hard to imagine anywhere voters have more resoundingly expressed their displeasure with a ballot question than in the Kelly School District, where they've rejected a school construction bond issue five times.

The votes began in 1997, when voters twice defeated a $1.6 million measure. The last vote was in November, when a $4.9 million measure went down with only 49 percent of the vote. It needed a four-sevenths supermajority, or about 57 percent.

Apparently, many voters were understandably intimidated by a tax increase of 75 cents on each $100 of assessed valuation.

Undeniably, there is a need for construction in the Kelly district, located outside Benton and made popular by its reputation for individual student attention in a safe setting. But the district is a victim of its own popularity.

Students must use portable classrooms, basically one-room trailers pulled up alongside the brick school building, for some course offerings. Those students are exposed to the elements when they change classes or go elsewhere in the school for other purposes.

In addition, class sizes have increased, and the high school curriculum is limited due to space constraints.

Certainly, parents want their children to have the best of everything in education. If their child needed advanced calculus to meet his career goals, for example, most parents would want him to have it.

But some in the Kelly School District keep saying the same thing: There is more than one way to build a 20-classroom high school addition. There are other funding mechanisms out there.

OK. Fine.

If that's the case, now is the time to explain what those mechanisms are.

The Builders for Tomorrow Committee is meeting with folks from the community to gather information and ideas. The Kelly School Board, sensing the futility of going on with the issue in the same manner, wants the committee to get some answers and report back.

To their credit, committee members already are saying maybe a sixth vote isn't the way to go. They're willing to consider other options.

So those in the community who have voted against past bond issues should step forward and explain how to build 20 classrooms with existing funds or government grants.

Because in our American system, taxpayers generally get the schools they pay for.