Anti-levy letter full of inaccuracies

I strongly disagree with John Kohler’s inaccurate and prejudiced letter in the Jan. 30 Reporter imploring area voters to vote against the maintenance and operations and technology levies that are critical to maintaining level funding for all students in the Kent School District (KSD).

Contrary to Mr. Kohler’s assertions, KSD is not using tax dollars to promote these levies. By law, school districts can provide information about levies ( www.ksdlevy.org) but cannot campaign for them. Instead, Citizens for Kent Schools (www.citizensforkentschools.org) is a group of community volunteers raising and using funds to encourage voters to support the levies.

We need to support our children by voting “YES” on these levies that are structured to specifically not increase taxes. Instead, local tax rates will remain the same in order to provide 20 percent of the district operating budget and maintain funding for critical technology projects for teachers and students. All while state funding for basic education continues to fall significantly short of its constitutional requirement.

I disagree even more with Mr. Kohler’s suggestions that our community’s challenges are being caused by the “increasing number of residents on the dole,” and that campaign literature being made available in multiple languages raises questions about whether “these residents are even American citizens.”

Our family has experienced benefits beyond measure from living and learning in and from our communities and neighbors as our daughter and son progressed through the most diverse schools in Kent – Scenic Hill Elementary, Kent Junior High (now Mill Creek Middle School) and Kent-Meridian High School. Not only did KSD educators prepare our children for academic success at the college level, they helped our entire family learn to value the diversity and address the social inequities of community life in the 21st century.

And as community co-chair for KSD’s Alliance for Diversity and Equity, I find Mr. Kohler’s prejudices against our neighbors who speak languages other than English and those in socioeconomic circumstances requiring public services as alarming and offensive. The very nature of public schools is about neighbors pooling our resources together to ensure that every child in our community receives a quality education that successfully prepares them for their future. And all students means every student, regardless of their family’s ethnicity or socioeconomic circumstance. Instead of perpetuating racial and socioeconomic prejudice that tears our community and its children down, we need to promote the value of diversity and address inequities in ways that build our community and its children up.

Please vote “YES” on the KSD levies. Let’s make it clear to John Kohler that the vast majority of Kent area residents value and appreciate all the children in our community enough to at least continue giving their schools and teachers the same level of resources to provide a quality education.

Dale Smith

Kent