Morgan sees bond issue as chance to control change

If people understand one thing about the school bond issue, Scott Morgan hopes it is this: Even if it fails come April 1, schools might still close.

“The great fallacy floating out there is that nothing will change if we just vote the bond down,” said Morgan, one of three Lawrence school board incumbents campaigning for re-election.

“Change is being forced on us by a very harsh financial reality,” he said. “We cannot just stare into the headlights of the oncoming train.”

It’s likely that Centennial and East Heights schools will close even if $59 million worth of improvements linked with consolidation are voted down, said the current school board president, who earned 11.36 percent of the vote in the primary election.

“What the bond allows us to do — Lawrence to do — is to do this the right way,” he said.

And even if they don’t close immediately, the two small schools will not stay open forever, Morgan said.

“I’m not trying to be cute with anyone,” said the 45-year-old publisher. “I’m just trying to lay it out the way it is.”

A Lawrence resident since 1988, Morgan earned journalism and law degrees at Kansas University and then worked about five years in Washington, D.C., before starting Morgan Quitno Press, which he runs with his wife, Kathleen.

Two of their children are at Sunflower School, and one attends Southwest Junior High School.

Morgan is finishing a four-year term on the board, and he believes passage of the bond issue is vital to the district’s progress. In recent weeks he’s also become increasingly optimistic that it will pass.

In the beginning, the community was filled with questions, Morgan said, adding that he would have been surprised had there not been some opposition.

But now he thinks many of those questions have been answered.

“I think we have put this discussion in a context,” he said, adding that the “ardent opposition” had not grown. “The question is not whether do we close schools or do we not close schools, the question is … do we close schools or cut programs?”

And he believes the community won’t — and shouldn’t — let the board continue to cut important programs while money stays tied up in buildings.

There are few alternatives, Morgan said.

Even when programs are cut, it is a painstaking process that only slowly adds up to significant dollar amounts. And the thought of increasing class sizes — the one sure-fire way to slash expenses — is abhorrent to the board.

So it’s frustrating, he said, when members of the public and other candidates suggest simplistic, but unrealistic, solutions.

“We are kidding ourselves if we think there is a way out of this by simply hacking at administration or holding bake sales or trying some untested sales tax approach,” he said. “This is a real problem that demands difficult, but real, solutions.”

He said he understood the difficulties many people were having with the closings of neighborhood schools.

“When change is coming and it’s change that you don’t want, you just assume that there’s an easy way out of it,” he said. “That’s very human.”

But down the road, people will appreciate having one state-of-the-art facility rather than two mediocre ones, he said.

And furthermore, he said, few other solutions exist: “These answers that these people are posing aren’t real.”