In early March, the Bentonville School District announced that the district had purchased 48 acres of land for $1.3 million along Regional Airport Boulevard on the southwest side of Bentonville.
Buried near the end of the story in the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette was a couple of paragraphs dealing with the difficulty in finding a suitable site at a reasonable price in Bella Vista. However, district administrators said the search for an additional school site in our community continues. And they are optimistic that an organization helping the district may have a promising site.
Now fast forward a couple of weeks and Bella Vista's gadfly Jim Parsons is still talking about how he and his group "Bella Vista Kids Come First" is still working to have an independent school district for Bella Vista. The group is an offshoot of his other group, the Bella Vista Patriots.
He cites the recent passage of a new state law that decreases the number of students required for a district to be or remain independent. Bella Vista could fall within the new parameters.
But here's the problem: If the Bentonville School District can't find suitable tracts to build one new school, where is Parsons' new district going to find land to build a new high school, a new junior high school, a middle school or two, and elementary schools to accommodate the more than 3,000 students in Bella Vista.
That doesn't factor in the costs of the new buildings, for which Mr. Parsons has never given a firm cost, but we suspect to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Why would parents be willing to give up one of the top districts in the state -- Bentonville -- and a really good district in Gravette, to have their students use churches and retired teachers -- as Mr. Parsons has proposed -- until new schools can be built?
Of course, that's all assuming Bentonville and Gravette would be willing to forgo the students from Bella Vista and the tax dollars that go with them. And that has to happen before the new district is possible.
We strongly suggest to Mr. Parsons that before he sends another pie-in-the-sky letter to The Weekly Vista that he get some costs together.
We want to know how much the new buildings are going to cost (and the state's per pupil allotment won't cover that), including the potential millage to taxpayers in the proposed district; where he is going to build the new buildings; how he is going to wrestle control of the Bella Vista students from Bentonville and Gravette; and how he is going to get the millage approved if the POA can't get a $6 assessment increase passed?
Last, where is the citizen support for this idea? His small group has a lot of work ahead of itself if we are ever going to see, as he puts it, "a football game between the Harrison Goblins and the Bella Vista Spelunkers."
Until we can get those kinds of answers, we will go with the old line from the Jerry Maguire movie -- "Show me the money!" Only in our case it's "Show us the costs!"
Editorial on 04/08/2015