BOWLING GREEN, Ohio — Bowling Green City Schools is once again asking voters to approve a levy to build a new high school.
This time, the new school's price tag is $72.8 million.
The current high school was built in 1963, and after 60 years, superintendent Ted Haselman said the band-aids that the district keeps putting on repairs aren't cutting it.
"We've had lots of maintenance issues that have been very very costly over the years," Haselman said. Most recently, last winter we had a pipe break that took out the entire office."
The BGCS Board in March picked Haselman to succeed Francis Scruci as superintendent beginning in the 2023-24 school year.
If the levy passes, district leaders are hoping to build a new high school where the current one is standing on West Poe Road.
Haselman said the older the building gets, the harder it is to get repairs done.
"It impacts the students, it impacts the staff. Teachers and classes need to be displaced," Haselman said. "Those changes do impact the daily activities that take place in our school building."
But Bowling Green resident Tim Stechschulte said he can't get behind the price tag.
"No one is against improving the schools and making them better," he said. "It's just kind of a combination of two different things. One, the timing with the inflation that we've got right now and then the fact that Bowling Green is in the midst of doing a new tax evaluation."
Stechschulte said he would be paying more than $900 a year, factoring in the tax assessment and the possible levy passage.
"That's just counting this high school levy, which is phase one," Stechschulte said. "If they get that passed, they have the grade schools they want to do. Then there's always the operations and maintenance levy to get passed."
He also pointed to the district putting levies on the ballot that are heavily based on property taxes, saying that maybe history wouldn't repeat itself if the district had a better formula.
For the district, Haselman said repairs come out of their pocket because the state won't help.
"In fact, they have deemed that the building is beyond repair, so they will not co-fund any repairs for this facility," he said.
Haselman said the only way the district would get funding from the state is if voters pass the levy. If it doesn't pass, he and the board would need to have a conversation to determine the next steps.
The district has tried and failed to pass similar levies four consecutive times. Voters in Bowling Green denied the most recent levy just last year by 52-48%.