<\/a>
\nThursday night saw the “formal” kick-off meeting<\/a> for the campaign to pass November’s school levy. There had obviously been many meetings before that, initially to just get this thing on the ballot<\/a> in the first place, and more recently just to track what the School Board was up to and get ready for this larger meeting. But Thursday was over 30 people, where we’d been running 6 to a dozen for months, had an agenda, brochures and flyers, and sub-groups working on specific tasks. Crazy! We even raised $700 to help pay for campaign materials, and sold out an order of 80 lawn signs, which was pretty darn cool.<\/p>\n

The turn-out was still University heavy, but a lot<\/em> more balanced than any previous MARQS<\/a> event. Even if it’s possible that the U community can carry this thing on their own, it’s clear (to me, at least) that we don’t<\/em> want to go that route. Having a significant part of town resenting the U community for “imposing” higher taxes on them just isn’t a happy thought. Luckily the last two school measures (the 2000 levy<\/a> that the state revoked a year later, and the vote 3 years ago to build the wonderful new elementary school building that just opened) passed with substantial majorities that included major support from across the community, so hopefully we can get the same broad support for this levy.<\/p>\n

Oh, and WeatherGirl<\/a> got to do the welcome and overview of the meeting (damn near killed her – she hates<\/em> public speaking – but she handled it fine<\/em>) and got elected MARQS treasurer :-). And almost every “official” speaker went out of their way to point out how wonderfully useful the MARQS website<\/a> is. It’s a really nice example of how a decent tool (WordPress<\/a> in this case) and a focussed webmaster who cares (WeatherGirl in this case) can make something really useful without a huge amount of effort or getting all fancy. I think it’s indicative that there are 32 posts from several different people and 9 “static” information pages (that have in fact been edited and updated quite often). If we’d tried to run this by just editing static HTML (which is how it started life) I can pretty much assure that it would have updated much less often and be much less useful in many important ways.<\/p>\n

Now we have to make good on all this promise and get this thing passed. Gooooooo TEAM!!!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thursday night saw the “formal” kick-off meeting for the campaign to pass November’s school levy. There had obviously been many meetings before that, initially to just get this thing on the ballot in the first place, and more recently just to track what the School Board was up to and get ready for this larger … Continue reading “School levy campaign up and running”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,11,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-events","category-politics"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p90sy-3T","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":208,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2005\/08\/01\/schools-are-more-important-than-pools\/","url_meta":{"origin":241,"position":0},"title":"Schools are more important than pools","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"1 Aug 05","format":false,"excerpt":"Below is a letter to the editor of the Morris Sun-Tribune that appeared in the 27 July 2005 edition (requires registration :-( ) under the title (of their choosing) of \"Pool or no pool, support levy\". This was written by Sub-Evil Boy and I while we were in Wisconsin, and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Education"","block_context":{"text":"Education","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/education\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":100,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2005\/03\/30\/school-levy-in-morris-rock-rock-on\/","url_meta":{"origin":241,"position":1},"title":"School levy in Morris: Rock, rock on!","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"30 Mar 05","format":false,"excerpt":"We just got back from a very energizing School Board meeting where a number of people did an excellent job of making it clear that the kind of cuts being consider would really hurt, and making a strong case for alternatives (like increasing our levy). Of the many people who\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Education"","block_context":{"text":"Education","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/education\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":254,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2005\/10\/30\/why-umm-students-need-to-vote-on-the-levy\/","url_meta":{"origin":241,"position":2},"title":"Why UMM students need to vote on the levy","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"30 Oct 05","format":false,"excerpt":"Below is a letter to the editor for the University Register, UMM's student newspaper... Tuesday, the 8th of November, the residents of the Morris Area School District will turn out to vote on a proposed school levy. While most UMM students realize that they can vote in this election, I\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Education"","block_context":{"text":"Education","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/education\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":110,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2005\/04\/10\/my-letter-appeared-in-the-sun-trib-yesterday\/","url_meta":{"origin":241,"position":3},"title":"My letter appeared in the Sun-Trib yesterday","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"10 Apr 05","format":false,"excerpt":"My letter on the school levy situation appeared in the Morris Sun-Tribune yesterday. It was in good company, sitting next to a nice letter from a group that had been involved in a Blandin foundation grant noting that a strong educational system was important for almost all aspects of our\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Education"","block_context":{"text":"Education","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/education\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":206,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2005\/07\/22\/the-people-shall-speak\/","url_meta":{"origin":241,"position":4},"title":"Huzzah! The people shall speak!","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"22 Jul 05","format":false,"excerpt":"Regular readers will remember from earlier posts such as this and that that a group of concerned citizens (MARQS) has been working to encourage the Morris School Board to address their budget issues head on by proposing a long overdue school levy. Tonight saw a major step in the right\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Education"","block_context":{"text":"Education","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/education\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Sub-Evil Boy","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/photos18.flickr.com\/23167264_0e5d0f3e7f_m.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":102,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2005\/04\/02\/school-levy-letter-to-the-editor\/","url_meta":{"origin":241,"position":5},"title":"Morris needs to re-pass the school levy: A letter to the editor","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"2 Apr 05","format":false,"excerpt":"The following is a letter to the editor that I intend to send to our local paper regarding the current school funding issues (also here). Comments and questions always welcome. (I should mention that as an anti-spamming measure, all comments have to be approved before they appear on the page,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Education"","block_context":{"text":"Education","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/education\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}