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The Louisville community is getting louder and more motivated to fight BVSD so their Louisville Middle School does not get demolished.  Their group is getting the usual brush-off from BVSD board members, and the community forum Chris King requested last month for Louisville community members provided nothing more than lip service from Don Orr. 

Here is a GREAT document from that Louisville group titled "How the Boulder Valley School District Failed the Voters of Louisville". We recommend reading it and passing it along to your friends. Many of their points are things the Boulder Valley community has heard over and over though the years.

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Here are a few of the opening paragraphs from "How the Boulder Valley School District Failed the Voters of Louisville" to get you started: 

    The Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) has failed the voters of Louisville.  The end result, the demolition of the historic 1939 portion of Louisville Middle School (LMS), will be the tragic loss of an icon crucial to the character and culture of Louisville.  That result was achieved by a series of processes that by design or neglect excluded the community’s values and denied Louisville voters any meaningful participation in an extremely important issue.  As explained below, the process failures included:

➢    Setting up an unnecessary and divisive conflict within the community of preservation vs. children/education;
➢    BVSD’s use of deceptive language (i.e. “renovate” and “remodeling” in lieu of  “demolition”) to obtain support of Louisville voters for the bond issue, and to later minimize community reaction to the planned demolition of LMS;
➢    Failure of BVSD to give serious consideration to Louisville citizens’ value for preservation of LMS;
➢    Generally creating an illusion of public participation without actually having it;
➢    Delegation of the crucial decision about whether to demolish the historic portion of LMS to a handpicked “Design Advisory Team” (DAT);
➢    Formation of a DAT which included only members with strong ties to the project or to BVSD, and which had no true community representation;
➢    Failure to give the DAT any tools or options to seriously consider preservation;
➢    Failure to give the DAT any timely cost analyses of preservation;
➢    Failure to give the Louisville community any reasonable notice that the design included demolition of the historic portion of LMS until after the design process had ended;
➢    A series of conclusory statements with little to no data or analysis to support them;
➢    Denial of any true community participation after the design had been adopted;
➢    Disregarding recommendations made to BVSD in a 2004 Communication Audit.
   

For those interested, here is a nice chart showing the growth of student enrollment for the BVSD elementary schools within the city of Boulder.

Makes you wonder where BVSD will put all the kids during this mini baby boom here in Boulder County. We recommend investing in companies who manufacture portable trailers.... 

Below is an email written by John Gless to members of the Boulder City Council, sent Feb. 18th. John is talking about a MOU ("Memorandum of Understanding: an agreement whose purpose is to enable all parties to facilitate the conduct of certain efforts of mutual interest") between the city of Boulder and BVSD. 

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Dear Members of Boulder's City Council,

I have some brief thoughts about tomorrow's discussion of City/BVSD collaboration, but cannot attend the meeting. 

Future of the MOU
I'm confused about the reasoning behind staff's recommended six month extension.  My understanding is that all the provisions in the MOU that contain "rights and obligations" the City wishes to preserve have either been acted upon already or codified within the real estate contract between BVSD and Wonderland.  If I'm right, then these provisions will remain in force whether the MOU is extended or not - assuming the real estate contract is not dissolved.  If the reasoning behind the extension is to provide a contingency in case the existing contract is dissolved and the sale is not consummated, then I have these observations:

1)  As noted in staff's analysis, the current MOU "is not well suited" for its intended purpose.  In frank terms, it is seriously flawed.

Broomfield High School students and staff were exposed to airborne asbestos after a boiler rupture last November. BVSDWatch Broomfield representative Louise Benson, MD, asked BVSD Communications Director Briggs Gamblin a series of questions about the district's response to this incident, and grades BVSD on it. The overall grade is less than satisfactory.

The following is from John Gless the frontman for the Washington School group:


The petition drive obviously generated a wave of media coverage and one-on-one community visibility that we have ridden a long way.  Unfortunately, it hasn't yet lead to any real breakthroughs.  So as this continues to slog along, we need to continue building community support even while the project work is under the public's radar.

This is what the Kloberdanz/Smoke video project is all about - (see their initial installment http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOI3pySNC6o)   community outreach that generates community support.  I checked www.crowdfunder.com today and it shows us averaging $100 per day with 23 days left to fund the video project.  Not bad for CrowdFunder, but also not enough to get this video off the ground.  In case you don't know how CrowdFunder works, if an item doesn't reach its target amount ($5,000 in this case) then none ($0) of the money that's pledged is actually conveyed from donors to recipients - it's a non-transaction.  So unless the average approaches $200 per day the rest of the way, there won't be any money to help produce this video, and that would be a shame.

Our video will document the rather disgraceful and ingenuous politics behind the closure decision and the struggle to keep the site from being unnecessarily defaced.  The great thing about that is the coverage of the struggle from here on out will be done in real time, not as something strictly from people's memories. 

This could be documentary filmmaking with both immediacy and purpose, and it can get done with very little money and very high quality due the skills of the producers and the ideas and energy from all of you.  I'm sure we'd love to get it done for zero money, as that's basically been the WSNA way up until now; but we can't get by forever just on freebies.  So please contribute by visiting CrowdFunder to make a pledge, and ask your friends who aren't on this list to do the same.  Isn't it worth a few bucks to have a direct impact on something that touches so many people and so many public policies? 

Video: 

"Rob Smoke interviews John Gless about the current debate over the future of the Washington School in Boulder, Colorado. January 30th, 2008"