Our community deserves a safe, secure, and accessible high school; Vote Yes TDHS

To the Editor,

Our community deserves a safe, secure, and accessible high school. By now readers know - if they didn’t before this bond - that our existing high school has shortcomings where accessibility, safety, security, and climate control are concerned. We know the cafeteria is grossly under-sized, leading many students to leave the campus during lunch and others to eat while sitting on floors in hallways and stairways.

Maybe there are some readers, however, who don’t realize our school district is missing out on significant funding from the federal government because of the lack of a bright, sufficiently sized cafeteria.

Title 1 is the nation's oldest and largest federally funded program, according to the U.S. Department of Education, providing over $7 billion to school systems across the country for students at risk of failure and living at or near the poverty level. The basic principles of Title 1 state that schools with large concentrations of low-income students will receive supplemental funds to assist in meeting student's educational goals. The number of low-income students is determined by the number enrolled in free and reduced lunch programs. When a school’s cafeteria doesn’t have the capacity to seat at least a majority of the student body, fewer students want to hang out there or use the service with a natural consequence of fewer students applying for and receiving help with the cost of their lunches, even when need is high. Lower numbers of successful applications for free or reduced lunch = diminished federal funding we might otherwise be entitled to.

Please vote early and VOTE YES for the new high school The Dalles deserves.

-Stacey Holeman