Monday was a pretty cheerful first day of school for Gibbon students, with a new $18 million, 139,000-square-foot building to explore. But longtime business and technology teacher Linda Brodine wasted no time impressing on her students that with such a shiny new toy comes a lot of responsibility, too. Gibbon’s taxpayers have made an incredible investment in you, she told them, and the onus is on all of us to make sure it pays off.

“I hope that they walk taller and hold their heads higher and live up to the expectations that the whole community has for them,” Brodine told me after school. “I’m expecting them to step up, and I think they will.”

It’s a refreshing way to look at the privilege of a new school building, and Brodine is right, too: Gibbon’s taxpayers have made a remarkable sacrifice for the sake of a new building. In retrospect, I’m still amazed that bond issue was passed on the first try. That got me thinking: How does Gibbon’s bond issue compare with those other districts have tried over the past few years? Here’s my back-of-a-napkin table:

*The enrollments come from the Nebraska Department of Education’s figures from the opening of the 08-09 school year.
**This was Aurora’s fourth try at this bond, dating back to 1999.

Obviously, not all bonds are created equal. Some of these were tried within wildly differing economic contexts — think February 2006 vs. November 2008 — and all were for different projects. But I think the most telling number here is the second half under “Amount,” and that’s the impact on the tax levy, expressed in cents per $100 in taxable valuation. (Fourteen cents, for example, extrapolates to $140 per $100,000 in valuation, 20 cents is $200, and so on.)

By that measure, this chart is a classic case of “one of these things is not like the other.” Nearly every bond falls in 8.5-cent to 20-cent range — it seems as though school districts have determined that no matter how much they need, there’s only so much they can ask voters to pay for. The only bond that falls outside is Gibbon’s whopping 49-cent asking, more than double what anyone else has even tried. And it passed on the first try. Think about that for a second: Gibbon’s bond was, on a taxpayer-impact level, 3.5 times the size of Broken Bow’s; yet it passed reasonably easily, while Bow’s got hammered.

Maybe, though, Gibbon’s voters just got snowed; they had no idea that was how much they were paying. That’s what a group of taxpayers claimed in calling for the recall of three of the district’s six school board members in May 2007. The vote became a de facto referendum, a mulligan on what the district’s voters had decided just eight months before. And the margin came out even wider in favor of the school board members. The message was clear: The voters understood what they were doing, and given a second chance, they affirmed it.

I’m entirely sure why Gibbon was so much more favorable toward such a huge bond than any other district in Central Nebraska (that’s another topic for another post), but the numbers are clear. For better or worse, Gibbon’s voters chose to make a financial sacrifice that no other community in the area has come close to touching in recent history. No wonder Brodine is so insistent on returning on an investment.