Auditorium fails to command 2/3 vote

By a mere 13 votes, a proposal to build an auditorium/fine arts addition to Belmont High School failed at Friday night’s Shaker School District meeting.

Officials said that 628 votes were cast by secret ballots, with 400 favoring the $5,776,121 15-year bond proposal and only 218 opposing it. But the measure needed 413 votes to reach the two-thirds majority required to appropriate for long-term indebtedness.

Many people left the meeting after casting their ballots — the polls were required to be left open for one hour — and Immediately after the vote result was announced a motion was made to reconsider the auditorium proposal. The vote to reconsider the issue passed easily in a floor count vote, 153-36.

District officials announced that the district meeting would reconvene Friday, March 24 at 7 p.m. at the same location, in the gymnasium of the Belmont Middle School, for a re-vote.

Following the failure to garner a two-thirds majority vote, School Board Chairman Tom Goulette of Belmont said he was disappointed in what he called a poor turnout of voters. “This school district has done much better at meetings in the past,” he said.

There are approximately 6,000 registered voters in Belmont and Canterbury.

Goulette and the other school board members voted in favor of the reconsideration measure.

Before the initial vote was take, board member Bill Hart told the crowd that the 23,200 square-foot addition would include an 800-seat auditorium, a 2,000-square-foot band room, a 1,200 square-foot art room, a 900-square-foot chorus/music classroom, two practice rooms, a 300 square-foot band storage space and a 2,430 square-foot stage. The addition would also allow more space in the present building to be converted into three or four standard classrooms.

Hart said the high school was already approaching its student population capacity and that the auditorium would be a resource for both communities that make up the Shaker district.

With every other measure on the ballot, the voters were in an agreeable mood. The district’s operating budget of $16,346,517, which was less than 3-percent higher than last year’s, passed unanimously with little discussion. In the same way, the voters put $50,000 in the School Facilities and Grounds Maintenance Expendable Trust Fund and $25,000 in the Special Education Expendable Trust Fund.

Both School Board Chairman Goulette and Moderator Tom Garfield easily won reelection to their posts. Ex-board member Graham Cynoweth with 124 write-in ballots won the open Canterbury School Board seat, which no one had formerly sought.

The final vote on a three-year teachers union contract proposal was not available at press time.