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Lake Pend Oreille School District is coming at us with another levy, and once again they’ve kept it pretty quiet until they approved it.

In seven school board meetings since October, which I attended, there were levy discussions about more staff and pay, needs and wants of different kinds, and when all was said and done, it was a $17 million, two-year supplemental levy, $1.3 million higher than the last one, an all-time record amount. This is now their habit: every supplemental levy is another record breaker, in spite of flat or declining enrollment.

You’d think there would have at least been some meeting notices in the paper, on the radio, or on the website so the public would have been made aware. There were not.

There were also no minutes of those levy meetings published during the months when the levy discussions took place. Only when the ballot was about to be printed did some of these minutes appear.

So how would you have known what’s going on with the levy — if indeed you had any idea that one was being discussed? Well, in your spare time you could sift through about 12 hours of video recordings of those school board meetings to find and follow levy discussions.

As usual, now that the LPOSD is ready to run it, they are gearing up to sell it to the public; also as usual, the sales job comes with doomsday warnings of what will happen if it fails.

This levy will be the only thing on the ballot on March 14 (at the cost of $61,000). Please vote no.

SHARON BANNING

Clark Fork