The Ralston school board voted 5-1 in favor of an $83,750,000 school-bond measure on Monday.

Under the plan – dubbed Future Ready Ralston — improvements will be made to all eight schools in the district, which includes six elementary schools, Ralston Middle School and Ralston High School. While seven of the schools would get renovations, Mockingbird Elementary will be replaced with a new building right next to the current one.

The project’s main focuses are on improving safety and security, enhancing learning environments, improving technology infrastructure and improving building energy and system efficiency. District officials say this is especially important for the elementary schools given they were all constructed in the 1960s or 1970s with only one – Karen Western, in 1996 – having any significant renovation done.

The most expensive portion of the bond issue is for Ralston High School. Under the proposal, new baseball and softball fields would be built on campus.

Board approval is just another hurdle cleared with the final being a vote by the public this fall. However, for Ralston Superintendent Mark Adler, the outcome meant a lot because of the amount of work and thought that’s gone into this project, and the obstacles it’s already overcame.

“Incredible,” Adler said of the board’s approval. “I want you to know it’s totally incredible coming from my seat. We’ve been working on this since 2018. We hired a company to study our facilities and really give us sound information with what’s needed in our buildings. We were really rolling on this thing in late 2019, early 2020, and literally had two or three meetings a week, and then we had to close school in March of 2020, so we basically had to push pause for a whole year.”

The final proposal came in about $10 million less than the original after taking public feedback into consideration.

“It’s been a lot of work for a lot of people and I’m just really grateful that we’re at least satisfied that we feel like we’ve done a lot of work to, in my opinion, come up with a quality decision, and I feel like we really listened to folks along the way to try and formulate this thing into a good package,” Adler said.

The district has hired a survey company, which reached out to 405 registered voters living within the school district.

“We used that feedback, the public meetings and we also had an online survey that mirrored the other survey that we pushed out to our parents, community members and staff,” Adler said. “We used all that information to guide our decision making.”

Another reason RPS feels the time is right is because of their current financial situation and sustained history over a decade of fiscal responsibility. Since the last time RPS went to the public for a bond issue in 2001, the district has made a concerted effort to be good stewards of taxpayer money and has reduced the district levy over the last 10 years.

Taxpayers would pay an additional $64.80 per year on a $100,000 home and bring the taxpayer levy to $0.648.

“When we were doing our surveying, we were really trying to learn what the public’s appetite is for their levy,” Adler said. “One of the best results we got was if we could get the levy increase to seven cents or less on the increase of the levy, we were at about 71% approval rating. So, what we tried to do is cut some off the top, get below seven cents and we feel like that’s a pretty good zone, and in my opinion still gives the kids the projects we really need.”

Adler also projects that the district will be debt free within the next six months.

“Before 2021 is out or early into 2022 … I’m going to say within six months we’ll be totally debt free in the district,” Adler said. “One of the things we’ve worked really hard on is keeping that levy somewhat constant, and with that we’ve been able to pay ahead on some of our bonds, which has saved us a lot of money. When we retire these bonds early, we’re not paying that interest.”

Between now and the fall vote, there is still plenty of opportunity for the public to learn about the bond issue.

“We’re going to send out some communication to all taxpayers and we’re going to host at least four more meetings where people can learn about what’s going to be in the bond,” Adler said. “Our meetings before were to get input, but now they’re going to be more informative.”

Detail information is also available at ralstonschools.org, Adler said.

Adler says the district is still working with Douglas County but expects that ballots to be mailed to registered votes on Sept. 20, with Sept. 24 as the last day to register to vote online and Oct. 1 the last day to register in person. On the timeline, the last day for in-person voting would be Oct. 11, and ballots would need to be postmarked or returned by Oct. 12.