BILLINGS — Billings schools report that 35% of teachers and students feel unsafe in school environments. But with Tuesday’s failure of two safety mill levies, district officials worry that number will grow.
On Wednesday in Billings, officials from the city, Yellowstone County and area school districts gathered to discuss the next steps to ensure safety in schools, following the two-to-one margin of defeat for the two levies.
"We'll do whatever we can do to ensure the safety and well-being of our students,” said Dr. Erwin Garcia, superintendent of Billings schools, on Wednesday at the Lincoln Center. "We're just going to have to really tweak our plan."
The levy would have paid for $5 million of safety improvements in the district.
"We're going to assess, tweak whatever is necessary, and come back to the voters again," Garcia said. "Because if safety is that important, then it has to be important every day in our district."
Garcia isn't giving up hope.
He and others are now headed back to the drawing board to formulate a revised levy to bring before voters.
"One thing that we're not going to give up on is ensuring that we present safety as the main topic of conversation for the voters. I don't think that we're looking at a bond. I think we continue to think about the safety levy as that's the main option moving forward,” Garcia said. "We're assessing. We're going to analyze the root cause of why, what is happening."
The two failed levies would have paid for surveillance cameras outside all of the district’s elementary schools and addressed mental health concerns, while also creating new positions to address gangs and high dropout rates.
"Our juvenile holding facility is overcapacity. And if we can't get involved in a child's life and help them make corrective actions, put mentors in their life so that they have hope for a brighter future, then we're going to only find ourselves having tougher and tougher decisions to make 5, 10, 20 years down the road,” said Chris Kukulski, the Billings city administrator, on Wednesday. "The size and magnitude of our challenges are growing relative to mental health, substance abuse, and just the breakdown of the family unit."
Kukulski was a part of Wednesday's discussion.
"I think our citizens are squarely frustrated by the fact that our tax structure puts everything at the local level on the shoulders of property owners. And that needs to change,” Kukulski said. "One of the things that has to happen is a conversation about how we shift the burden from property owners over to our users. And so we would pay that, whether that's in the form of a general sales tax or a local option tax. It needs to be used to reduce property taxes. And it needs to be used to strengthen investments in the things that build a community, infrastructure, and educational systems so that our community has a brighter future."
But it all starts with collaboration.
"I'm not exactly sure where we go from here, but it's a partnership," Kukulski said. "These meetings are between the school district, the city, and the county, so that we can collaborate with one another and work to move our community forward."
To learn more about the failed safety levies, click here.
