Though I am not old enough to vote yet, I have heard about the Sequim School District levy and think it's unfair that some people will actually vote "no." Maybe if you're one of them, you will change your mind once you hear from a Sequim Middle School seventh-grader.

Some people don't know how important this levy is to the schools.

My choir teacher said that the levy helps pay for her job. I remember thinking, "What are they going to do if the levy doesn't get passed? Are they going to stop having choir classes? What about my art classes? Are they going to drop them also?

What's a better way to use your money than to give it to the school district that desperately needs it?



Lengthen the bar

My mom brought home a handout about the levy recently. It has all these charts on it that show how much less money the Sequim School District gets from the levy compared to county and state averages. The bar for Sequim is really low, while the county is more than four times as large and the state is even bigger.

On another chart, it shows that Sequim students have gotten higher results on the SAT test than other students in the state. I think it's ironic that the Sequim School District educates students better than other schools and yet they get less levy money per student.

There is a pie chart on the handout that shows what the levy money funds. Fifty-eight percent of it is going to be used to pay teachers and staff, which is very important. Eleven percent of it is going to be for extracurricular and the rest is for supplies, support staff, facilities/maintenance, technology, curriculum and transportation. So if you think that this is going to pay for extra stuff the school doesn't need, think again.

Kristina Holtrop is a student at Sequim Middle School and president of its Writers' Club.