MAILBAG - March 1, 2001

The most important issue on Fountain Valley’s radar screen is the

unification of our kindergarten through eighth-grades and high schools.

There are many reasons why this must be done.

It is paramount that we get a cohesive K-12 curriculum, we need a

home-grown system to reflect the wants and desires of our community and

we need to extricate Fountain Valley High School’s faculty and students

from the Huntington Beach Union High School District.

If Fountain Valley families in the Garden Grove School District wish

to join us they’re welcome, but we won’t drag them.

The unification process serves an important lesson in civics. It

demonstrates how much our liberty has been stolen as the result of state

ownership of our educational system combined with the state’s penchant

for social engineering.

Our nation was founded on a few principles. Our natural rights of

life, liberty and property were endowed to us by our creator. Our

government was instituted to protect those rights. The form of government

we would have would be a representative republic, not -- as opposed to

popular misconception, a democracy. We were to have a federal system with

limited and decentralized government, not a strong centralized system.

These founding principles were to allow us as individuals to act on

our own free will and as a society to have self-determination. When one

examines the nine criteria for unification laid down by the bureaucrats

and politicians in Sacramento, one quickly appreciates how much we as

citizens of Fountain Valley have had our right of self-determination

stolen.

Almost all of the criteria have to do with satisfying centralized

agencies and other bureaucracies outside what will become our unified

school district. This is absurd. Why should we have to genuflect to the

state and county boards of education? Why should we have to pander to

other school districts?

One criterion is really repugnant. Why should our unification depend

upon desegregation? People live where they do because they have exercised

their 1st Amendment right of freedom of association and their economic

right to buy where they can afford. Inasmuch as a truly free society has

to be colorblind, why do we have desegregation? We shouldn’t, but we do

because we’re not free.

BRUCE CRAWFORD

Fountain Valley

District should move ahead with bond measure

The Huntington Beach City School District has decided to hold a

special election in June for a $25-million bond measure to improve its

aging facilities. There are some who believe that the district should

wait until next year and hold this bond election in conjunction with the

regularly scheduled elections in June 2002.

Holding a special election will probably cost the district an extra

$30,000 to $40,000. Those who believe the district should wait until next

year argue that this additional cost is a waste of taxpayers’ money that

could be better spent on the schools’ needs. But this is a near-sighted

and flawed conclusion.

Even assuming an inflation rate as low as 2%, the value of $25-million

will be about $500,000 less in one year. In other words, what the

district can buy in terms of materials and services declines by about

$40,000 every other month that the bond measure is delayed.

The district needs to be deliberate in its decision. Taxing the

residents should not be done lightly. But the district has spent a good

year assessing (and paring down) its needs, developing a comprehensive

financial plan to address those needs, and weighing the community’s

support of its plans, including the proposed bond measure. Having done

its homework, the district needs to move forward as expeditiously as

possible.

Every month of unnecessary delay will cost the taxpayers another

$40,000 in terms of less value received. To delay the measure for another

year in order to save $30,000 to $40,000 in election costs is penny-wise

and pound-foolish. Do the math.

BILL WALLACE

Huntington Beach