Ever and always it seems school districts reach out to their patrons to inquire about, or lobby for, finance and spending proposals.
But what happens next in Kuna will be worth the rest of us paying some attention.
The district will have new spending proposals on the block in years to come; that much is a given. Its website explains bluntly: “New families mean new students. We strive to predict the number of new children and new schools needed to serve them by closely tracking developments in our boundaries. Based on developments that have been approved by our counties and city, Kuna is expecting our student population to grow significantly in the next 10 years.â€
No kidding. The population of Kuna in 1980 (the little community with a three-block downtown is the image of it I’ll always carry) was 1,767. The most recent estimate leading up to 2022 was 27,229, enough now to make it the 13th largest city in Idaho. A decade from now it may add another 10,000 and move up still higher in the rankings. The trajectory has been a little softer than Meridian’s, but like that former dairy outpost it is a small town no longer. Kuna is a mid-sized and booming suburb.
It is populated largely, apparently, by people seeking a small town, traditional, maybe ex-urban existence, many specifically refugees from higher-tax and stricter-regulation places. The question is, how does – and will – that comport with the image of the place people thought they were moving into?
As a matter of political ideology, Kuna was deeply conservative decades ago and by all electoral indicators remains so today. It has been a place highly resistant both to social change and to higher taxes. But all of that, and the attitudes of residents old and new, are about to bump into some social realities.
Local schools are among the most obvious of those.
The explosive growth at Kuna has been pressuring local schools for years, and this March the board asked voters to approve a massive $111 million bond – large for even the biggest Idaho school districts and enormous for one this size, but giving the district enough new schools and other facilities to keep up for a while. The voters rejected it, providing well short of the two-thirds favorable that was needed for passage.
So now what?
The district is looking for public comment, but in a new direction: What should be cut, starting this fall, to try matching the demands to resources. So the district is asking patrons – and parents – what should go on the chopping block. Sport programs? Career and technical training? School resource officers? Electric classes? Other things?
Kuna’s classes already have a high student-teacher ratio. How many students will be crammed into a limited number of schools and classrooms?
How far and where, in other words, should Kuna schools start a race to the bottom? Without more money, that eventually will start to happen.
This isn’t a criticism of the district’s leaders or educators. Their voters are leaving them with little choice.
All this is, as noted, worth your consideration even if you don’t live in Kuna: Many of the same factors are in play in most of Idaho’s faster-growing communities. (Boise would be a political exception anyway, but in the last year it’s been estimated to have actually lost population.) Kuna’s most recent annual growth estimate (these numbers cover cities rather than school districts) was 2.3 percent. Meridian’s was 3.2 percent, Nampa’s was 4.3 percent, Caldwell’s 3.2 percent, Post Falls 3.6 percent and Star a whopping 13 percent.
Schools in all these areas will be encountering faceoffs between politics and demography.
And schools are only part of the cutting edge.
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