The planning for nearly $264 million in school building repairs and upgrades will shortly be undertaken in the Tucson Unified School District, now that voters have overwhelmingly approved a historically large bond.
By a roughly 59% to 41% margin, voters gave a thumbs up to Proposition 496, which called for spending $480 million on a wide variety of facility projects.
Besides the school building repairs and upgrades, the 10-year bond will also fund some $43 million in classroom and learning space improvements, while allotting $66.4 million for technology upgrades.
Depending upon the individual school, work will also include sewer line replacements, new flooring, updated fire alarm systems, and new court sunshades.
With more than 47,000 students and spanning some 230 square miles, the Tucson Unified School District is the largest public school district in southern Arizona with 87 individual schools.
A large number of those schools were built in the 1950s, during a decade when Tucson was experiencing the first wave of an in-migration that would take the city from 45,000 people to more than 542,000 today.
The newly approved bond is the first general facilities bond of its kind to be approved by Tucson Unified School District voters since 2004.
Next step in the bond program will see the establishment of a bond oversight committee, and subsequent finalizing of various facility projects and scheduling.
Reacting to the bond vote victory, Ravis Shah, president of the district’s governing board, remarked that the result of the election will “transform our district.”
According to the Arizona Daily Star, Shah added that all of the district’s schools will now have “upgraded facilities, modernized infrastructure, new learning spaces and labs, new buses and new safety security systems.”
By Garry Boulard