On Nov. 5, the citizens of Tahoma School District will be able to vote on a bond intended to address overcrowding in the schools. The bond would raise the money required to build larger schools.

There is another option available. The school district administration has determined how to handle the overcrowding should the bond not pass. The elementary schools will operate year-round on four schedule tracks. The junior high and high schools will run double sessions on a conventional school year.

These are solutions with difficult side effects. I have experienced them.

In the spring of 1973, my junior high school burned to the ground.  It was a sunny, unusually warm day for southeast Idaho, and my friends and I were just finishing lunch outside.  The bell to return to class gave a feeble ding-a-ding and quit.  Then smoke began to billow from the roof over the gym and out the gym doors. Being the rebellious 13-year-old that I was, I cheered. I couldn’t imagine a more fortuitous event. Within four hours, the tinder-dry, 50-year-old building was fully ablaze. Fire crews worked through the night to keep the fire from jumping across the streets to similarly aged houses.

If I recall correctly, the fire happened on a Tuesday about three weeks before summer break. On Monday the following week, we started split sessions with another junior high school across town to finish the school year. They attended in the morning from 7 to noon. We attended in the afternoon from 1 to 6.

Honestly, in spite of the schedule, I thought the much newer building was very nice compared to the old artifact we had been attending. The halls were wide enough to get everyone to and from class without resorting to running outside the building to get from end to end, and the rooms were actually heated. Although I was resigned to attending the afternoon session through my eighth grade year, I looked forward to being in a new building as a freshman.

But the good citizens of my hometown rejected the bond. So my classmates and I were conscripted to two more years of afternoon school until we could attend the high school our sophomore year.

I spoke earlier of side effects.  Here they are.

The two sessions effectively created two social classes of students. The students attending the morning session had to rise very early, but had the rest of the day to get a burger, get a job, go to a matinee movie, or take the ski bus. The students attending the afternoon session could sleep in but did not have the occupational and recreational options.

Local diners became noisy teen hangouts. Lunchtime, which retirees once enjoyed in peaceful bliss, became noisy intimidating ordeals.

Truancy became virtually unenforceable. No matter the time of day, all a student had to say is that they attended school on the other session.

Petty crime rates increased. Most students are relatively good and polite. Every crowd has a few that aren’t, and you know who they are.

Yet for Idaho Falls at that time, their solution was not nearly as difficult as it will be here for us.  They had the teachers, the administrators, the buses, the drivers, etc. They just didn’t have a building to put the students in.

For our district, a second set of teachers, administrators, and support staff must be hired to staff the additional sessions at the junior and senior high schools. They don’t come free.

The Tahoma buses will run all the time, earlier in the morning and later in the evening, effectively jamming rush hour traffic morning and night. Idaho Falls simply did not have much of a rush hour then.

Tahoma will need to hire additional bus drivers, as they cannot be on duty from 5:30 a.m. through 7:30 p.m. And it is likely that Tahoma will need to purchase more busses to serve the unusual mix of school schedules.

If a family has one student in grade school and another in junior or senior high school, they will just need to deal with the conflicting schedules.

Tahoma is unlikely to be immune from the problems of increased truancy, petty crime, and the social inequalities of double sessions.

This is not a solution. This is triage.

In 1974, a strange thing happened in my hometown. Local businesses and the city government, including the police guild, endorsed a school bond to build a new junior high school.  The bond in Idaho Falls eventually passed and a new school was built. I never did attend it.

There is another common theme between Tahoma and this story.  The Maple Valley City Council and the Maple Valley Chamber of Commerce both support this bond for Tahoma schools.

Vote for it.

My kids will have all graduated high school, and will not attend the new schools here.  But I’m voting for the bond because I believe other kids, maybe your kids, should.

John Kunze

Maple Valley