The Montgomery County R-II School District is asking community members to approve an eight million dollar no-tax-increase bond issue in the April 2 election that will help pay for improvements in all four of the district buildings – Montgomery County middle and high schools and Jonesburg and Montgomery City elementary schools.

The projects include replacing of the boiler and the remodeling of the old restrooms at the high school, renovation of the classrooms and replacing of the old existing roof at JBE, adding additional parking at MCE and replacing windows at the middle school.

“You think about these buildings as big houses,” R-II Superintendent Dr. Tracy Bottoms said. “In your house that you own, at some time you have to replace a roof, you have to upgrade your heating and cooling sources, you may replace your windows, you may put on fresh paint and you put in new flooring. These are big houses with 1,000-plus kids and 170 staff members within our communities in and out of these. So there are high traffic areas at times. It makes sense that if I own my own house, sometimes I have to put money into the house I live in. That’s what we’re doing. We’re putting money into the community’s houses in a sense, which is what the schools are.”

The bond issue is called Proposition K.I.D.S. Dr. Bottoms said the school district first talked about having the bond issue during the beginning of last school year.

“Some of these projects that were trying to get to where conversational pieces that have been left over from prior bond elections,” he said. “We started this conversation again in August and September. I think it was around September when we started having these conversations and they tried to form a committee and bring those folks in and have the people come and actually tour all four of these buildings to look at the issues that we see within these buildings. Then, we looked at those things, put down those priorities and started working with a company to give us some pricing guidelines to see how much it would cost the district so we’ll try to figure out if we’re going to run a bond, what will be the amount of the bond based on the pricing we’re getting to fix or solve some of these concerns that we have.”

Dr. Bottoms said in the last four years, the school district has spent more than six million dollars on improving facilities, four million of which were spent on the high school boiler.

“Since 2020, two and a half million came from leftover bond proceeds,” Bottoms said. “The rest of that came from district obligated money or money that came from the federal COVID Relief Act of 2020. So it’s important for us to note that we’re spending money. We have spent $6.5 million dollars over the last four years to continue updating our facilities. It’s not like we haven’t been spending money on facilities. The important part of that is we don’t want the community to believe just because we think we need something we have to automatically jump and ask the community to help us.”

Dr. Bottoms said the high school boiler is the most concerning of all of the projects. The high school is the only building in the district that has a one heat source unit.

“If the heat goes out there, we won’t have heat in a lot of those classrooms and we have to shut down,” Dr. Bottoms said. “We had problems with the boiler two years ago, but we were able to kind of work through that. Parts of that boiler system no longer exist.”