Safety concerns are just one of the reasons Blakely principal Reese Ande and his staff hope that voters will pass a $81.2 million bond proposal for a new campus.

That jaw-dropping figure, on the other hand, is just one of the reasons Rod Stevens, who wrote the ballot’s con statement, is urging residents to vote “no.”

Voters will ultimately decide the fate of Proposition 1 during the Special Election on Feb. 9, and the ballot measure, if passed, will fund the replacement of  Captain Johnson Blakely Elementary School and the Bainbridge High 100 Building, plus pay for improvements and repairs at other district facilities.

The danger zone

The pickup/dropoff lane in front of Blakely is like a pinball machine, only instead of one ball, you’ve got 300-plus kids darting erratically across a narrow bus line, one lonely crosswalk and cars that just keep coming through the school’s single access point.

Rebecca Sonsalla, the district’s transportation supervisor who’s been driving routes at Blakely for more than five years, said the afternoon pick-up, especially, is terrifying.

“Parents are parked out on the street, in the lot, walking toward their kids. Kids are walking toward their parents, kids are getting on the bus — it’s amazing.”

The set-up is the problem, Sonsalla explained.

“The safety concerns are about the separation of cars and buses — there is none. We line up really tight because kids walk through buses, parents walk through buses to get to the sidewalk, but you can’t monitor everything. Children are small; they’re in elementary; they don’t get it.”

Although nobody has been hurt yet, Sonsalla is wary.

“We’re cautious of what’s happening in the road, but we really have no control over that,” she said.

Hemmed-in STEM

Three hundred and seventy five students come through Diane Bedell’s 30-by-30-foot portable each week. They receive STEM instruction in support of Next Generation Science Standards, completing engineering design challenges to develop content knowledge and problem solving skills “essential in our world today.”

Storage issues, Bedell said, often disrupt the student experience.

Her small cabinet and open shelving aren’t expansive enough to store the 3-D models students build over consecutive classes or even the materials needed to construct them, meaning models sometimes get broken.

“Because of the crowding, student projects can get damaged or simply misplaced,” she said.

Valuable classroom time is wasted as students search for missing work.

And suddenly, she has a super disappointed kid on her hands: his earthquake-safe building got crushed prematurely and now he has to start over or stare at all the other kids’ projects and wonder what went wrong with his.

Bedell has lots of cool tools — saws, drills, hot glue guns, hammers, etc. — for cutting-edge construction, but because she has no designated workspace for them, she’s forced to put them away.

It’s a learning loss, she said.

“When not easily accessible, students often forget these tools are available to help them with their designs.”

Students that need to use the bathroom have to take a key to let themselves into the building.

“This is not easy for kindergarten and first-grade students,” she said. “Usually, they have to go in pairs and work time is lost.”

Sticker shock

Stevens, who wrote the statement against Prop. 1 for the county voters’ guide, is not against a new Blakely per se; he’s just against excessive spending.

“When it comes to good buildings, most people here will vote for a Toyota or even a Lexus, but [the district’s] asking for a Range Rover,” he said. “They’re asking to spend too much money for buildings that won’t produce a good educational return.”

Stevens, a revitalization strategist and financial analyst, calculates that the district could save taxpayers $18.9 million on the cost of a new Blakely if they “eliminated unnecessary capacity” (reduced the number of seats from 450 to 425) and built it at the same cost per seat as two new elementary schools in Issaquah, which he noted district officials have already indicated are comparable.

“The Blakely plan amounts to $103,000 per student compared to $65,000 per student in the new Issaquah schools that the district has benchmarked, or less than $70,000 per student in two new Seattle schools benchmarked by the district,” he explained.

A “no” vote is a vote against bloat, said Stevens, who has kids at Sakai Intermediate and Woodward Middle School. “There’s a General Election 10 months from now. If we vote ‘no’ now, that gives the district 10 months to revise its plan and get it right.”

This extra spending, he added, isn’t getting us better education.

“In fact, Blakely, the school they want us to replace, is designated as excellent by the state, but not Wilkes, the new school they opened several years ago.”