'There’s literally no other choice'

The Gervais School District recently received a CTE revitalization grant toward bolstering a culinary arts program.

The grant would pay for a remodel of Gervais High School’s culinary arts room, which has remained largely untouched since the building opened in the mid-1960s. The program would also fund a teacher and would teach students how to craft food items as well as how to run a business.

Unfortunately, this program might not even get off the ground if the $28.13 million bond on the May 21 ballot doesn’t pass. Without the needed major renovations to existing buildings, safety and security upgrades, and completion of Gervais Middle School, which currently has no cafeteria or library, the school board has publicly acknowledged that it will vote to close the district and consolidate with neighboring districts.

“When we started this (the bond process a couple years ago), we identified 119 projects. So the 28 we’ve identified (for this bond) are the bare bones,” Superintendent Dandy Stevens said. “There is nothing particularly cutting edge or fancy about these projects. All these projects have to do with infrastructure, like heating, plumbing, air quality.”

The bond measure proposes voters pay $1.85 per $1,000 assessed over 25 years. That means for a property worth $100,000 in assessed value (not the same as market value), the owner would only pay $15.42 a month.

Additionally, if the bond passes, the district will be awarded a $6 million matching grant that would also fund facilities in need of major repairs. The district, which is allocated money from the state that can’t fund major building renovations, has also attempted to get funding through the legislature and other grants, exhausting every possible avenue.

“There’s literally no other choice; there’s no other way of asking for money,” Stevens said. “We don’t know where else to go.”

Consolidation of the district

With this being the ninth time in 30 years the district has tried to pass a bond, district officials have shared that, should this bond measure fail, the board is committed to close down the district before the 2025-26 school year, with students being reassigned to neighboring districts.

“If this bond fails after proposing multiple price points and different configurations of projects (over the past nine bond measures), the board believes there’s no amount of money voters will support, no matter what project we put together,” Stevens said. “Our children deserve to walk into a building that has the same opportunities as a student who goes to a Woodburn or Salem-Keizer school, and our kids don’t have that. They don’t have the basic necessities.”

Should the bond fail and the district vote to consolidate, the student body will be divided into new districts, depending on where they live.

“That would be the hardest thing, to be a new person and adjust to all that for just one year,” said Patty Mendoza, who is a sophomore now but would be a senior in the 2025-26 school year. “The kids there would get preference for sports teams, even if we’re seniors. I think we’d all be treated as less.”

It’ll be up to each receiving district how they engage the new portions of their community.

Additionally, the unions would begin working together, possibly negotiating for a few staff members with sufficient seniority to gain employment with a new district. But the majority of the 164 staff members at Gervais would lose their jobs.

“Part of our security is something that’s built in and that’s our invaluable staff,” said Julie Powers, who manages facilities for the district. “That’s what makes Gervais unique — the staff knows the students and there’s that built-in trust. When you take our buildings away, you’re taking away experiences the students are not going to have anymore because in a bigger district, they won’t know everybody.”

And the fate of the town of Gervais if the schools closed is unclear.

“Our facilities are the closest thing we have to a community center,” Powers said. “We offer a lot of programs. We open doors to the community often. There are so many ways we serve the community and when you take our buildings and the autonomy of having our own schools in town, there’s not much left.”

All the neighboring school districts have a bond rate higher than the one proposed on the ballot. So the slogan, “Vote Yes to Pay Less” has been going around, encouraging voters to not just support a lower rate, but also Gervais’ autonomy.

In every last one of the previous eight bond measure attempts, in-town voters approved the measure, but the overall vote was swayed by the larger voter turnout of those living outside the city itself. So this time around, the district has been reaching out to those property owners to garner support on the ballot.

In fact, Stevens will be hosting a meet and greet in Brooks from 8:30 to 11:30 a.m. Wednesday, May 15 and Friday, May 17 at the True Value Hardware Store on Brooklake Road. She said she believes most people already have their questions answered, but she’s still got a message for skeptics.

“For those who say consolidation doesn’t happen, Gervais was formed through consolidation,” Stevens pointed out. “It does happen and it potentially will happen. That’s not a threat. Just because you don’t like the consequence doesn’t mean it’s a threat or intimidation. If we didn’t share the potential consequences, then we wouldn’t be transparent.”

She continued: “It’s for our children. If we can’t come around the one thing in the town that really speaks to our future, then I don’t know where else we can find common ground.”