Healdsburgers

Looks like the Healdsburg Unified School District (HUSD) is once again sounding the alarm about the “catastrophic” budget cuts they say they’ll be forced to make in the upcoming year. Where have I heard this before? Oh yeah, just about every year since we moved to town more than a decade ago. Their brilliant solution, as usual, is to try to raise the parcel tax that goes to the schools. I’ve voted for past parcel taxes, too. Well, enough is enough; I’m no longer interested in letting the school district stick their hand into my pocket. They simply can’t be trusted not to squander the money.

My experience with the now-defunct Access Healdsburg shows me the worth of HUSD’s promises. Back in the 90′s, they went to the community for a bond issue intended to fund a facility expansion plan that included building a Media Center on the High School campus. The community came through for HUSD, and the non-profit I helped found moved into the Media Center building that was built with the community’s money. We built a great set of studios, ran a community TV station, and served HUSD staff and students and the community for seven years.

But then HUSD decided they needed a new place to put the district office, because they had made a stupid decision to move into portable buildings when they vacated their previous offices. So they cravenly evicted Access Healdsburg and destroyed a fully functional television station that the community had paid for, just so a bunch of bureaucrats could have a more comfortable place to sit their sorry asses while they mismanaged the district. HUSD seems to have plenty of money to renovate the Media Center building into a palace for administrators, but can’t scrape up the cash to, you know, actually deliver an education to Healdsburg’s students. And now they’re once again crying poor.

They get no sympathy from me.