Sartell needs a new high school, and voters should approve one.
The Sartell-St. Stephen School District also needs long overdue upgrades and improvements at its four current schools – other good reasons to approve the $105.8-million-bond issue in the May 24 election.
Before going to the polls, voters might want to consider the following factors: growth, lack of space, safety and security, and evolving learning methods.
Sartell, fortunately, unlike so many dying towns, is a growing city blooming with dynamic interactions – residential, commercial, industrial, recreational, cultural and – so importantly – educational. Education is a kind of foundation shoring up the other interactive assets in Sartell. As Sartell Newsleader reporters know so well, when they ask newcomers to the city why they move to Sartell, their answer is almost always, “excellent education system” and “quality schools.”
Thus, it’s not surprising school enrollments are dramatically increasing every year in Sartell, consistently surpassing estimates made by expert demographers. Such growth always presents challenges – a shortage of teaching-learning spaces foremost among them. Every school in Sartell is stressed and strained because of space shortages, despite the ingenious, creative efforts of staff to make do with space constrictions.
Anybody who has been to the current Sartell High School in the morning or in the afternoon knows what a massive traffic jam and safety worry that place is, wedged tightly against a residential area with bottleneck traffic everywhere one looks. Again, growth has exacerbated safety concerns there and also at Sartell Middle School along the same street, not to mention the difficulties of ingress and egress at both schools.
Along with safety are security concerns. Those schools were designed and built long before school shootings became so shockingly, tragically, heartbreakingly common throughout the nation. There are now ways to shore up security, especially at school entrances, as well as ways to monitor and shut down areas within schools should some kind of deranged assault, God forbid, begin.
Yet another reason the school bond referendum should be approved is because teaching and learning methods in just the past decade or so have changed drastically. Gone are the days of boxy classrooms in which teachers lecture, students take notes, memorize and then regurgitate facts during tests. Learning nowadays is much more creative, innovative, hands-on and small-group oriented. As such, learning activities require more space and/or more flexible spaces that can be altered for a number of varied uses.
Along those same lines, teaching-learning has become more than textbooks and written tests. Nowadays, social connectiveness is an integral part of learning. That kind of learning, involving social skills and problem-solving, includes everything from involvement in volunteerism to enhance the city to extracurricular activities, also socially connective, that center around music, visual arts, theater, technical arts-and-crafts and physical education. All of those pursuits require larger and/or specialized spaces.
For all of those reasons, school district residents, we hope, vote “yes” to the May 24 school bond ballot questions.