Sunday, September 25, 2011

Should Kuna Boys & Girls Club pursue one of the Kuna school buildings?

Indian Creek Elementary School or Ross Elementary School would be a good location for the Kuna Boys & Girls Club, Kuna school board chairman Jim Ford said last week at the Kuna Chamber of Commerce meeting.
The Kuna school district is putting forth several revenue-generating and cost-cutting ideas in light of projected budget cuts. The district is floating the idea of selling or renting out several school facilities, including Indian Creek and Ross, the Old Fourth Street Gym and Initial Point High School.
Meanwhile, a local steering committee has been working to build a permanent Boys & Girls Club in Kuna, as part of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Ada County. For the past three summers, hundreds of Kuna children have attended a temporary summer program located in Reed Elementary.
The local committee has secured donated land north of Boise Street and west of Linder Road, but the proposal has run into roadblocks in the approval process.
The Kuna Steering Committee has not been approached by the School District about the possibility of a lease or purchase of any of its buildings, according to committee member Janis Dotson.

1 comment:

slfisher said...

I used to work for a company called Gartner, and Gartner promoted a concept known as "Total Cost of Ownership." In other words, it suggested you consider all the factors around ownership of something rather than just its price.

Now, in their case, they were typically referring to computer hardware or software, but the concept is applicable anywhere. Let's say you want a car. And you can spend $1000 and buy a car, or you have an uncle that's willing to give you his old car for free. Wow! Great deal!

Except that the old car doesn't run so well, it turns out, and it gets lousy gas mileage, and it's classed as a sports car so it costs a lot more to insure....anyway, the point is, the "free" car ends up costing a lot more to operate over the years.

Now, it's very generous of the School District to offer a building, and I'm sure they'd sell it for a fair price, and we'd have a Boys and Girls Club that much sooner (especially the way the process of getting the land has been dragged out).

On the other hand, the reason the school district is considering shutting down these buildings is that they're inefficient to run and operate.

So I hope the Boys and Girls Club looks pretty closely at the operations expenses associated with running these buildings before it accepts an offer from the School District.