ConVal Article 10 represents a very rare voting opportunity. It’s not often we get a chance to vote on something that could possibly cause significant, real hardship to thousands of our neighbors. This is not an exaggeration.

Imagine this – my youngest school children (even kindergartners) forced to take a long bus ride to a building far from home, not in their hometown. Every school activity my young children do, or if they need something, is far from home and requires extra time for travel. Like we’re not already stretched too thin.

My home value, my core financial asset, will drop, whether I have kids or not. I literally lose money. Not along with everyone else like a recession, just my town, because it suddenly has no public school. The tax savings with this vote are minor at best, if any at all, and it will not equal the financial hit of losing value in my home.

The committees and boards and events of my very active and engaged town will struggle, even more than they currently do, to find participants, because now all the young families will have their time and energy pulled into another town, if they even stay in our town. And new young families won’t move here to replace them. My little kids, in their formative years, will no longer spend their time in the town I chose, the town I love, because literally they spend more awake hours somewhere else. It’s a significant loss of connection, with long-term impact.

We lose decision-making over the largest municipal building in our town. We don’t have say in who could move in. And it’s a major loss; this is a beloved location, used frequently for events and gatherings. And then there are the residents near the schools that are taking in all these new students. It’s not a handful, or a dozen, it’s around 40 new out-of-town students in each school. The car traffic is going to totally overwhelm the streets, because almost every parent with means will drive their child to a faraway school rather than use the long bus ride. That will damage the home price values for those neighbors and have significant disruption to their lives.

Any single one of these disruptions and harms should be cause to reconsider a course of action, but this one vote risks dropping all of them on us.  

If we were going to do something that carried such high risk of personally harming literally thousands of our district residents, that better be a plan that is blow-your-mind awesome, with certain positive results, and the last resort.

But this is not the last resort. And it is not well planned. There are many other changes we could make that would support our budget goals without causing so much personal harm.

I appreciate that the School Board is focused on the education of our students, and I agree we need a massive change to make the budget work. But it is wildly irresponsible to ignore the very personal and real harm that is at risk here. This is not harm to a few outlying individuals; it is a massive disruption to drop on four of our towns, literally thousands of residents.

Vote no on ConVal Article 10. Let the School Board hear clearly that we want options, not just one poorly developed risky plan.

Rose Lowry is a Temple resident.