SAGINAW TWP, MI — It’s not easy to stop the shower water in Heritage High School’s boys locker rooms.
Turning off the shower faucet knobs won’t do the trick anymore — that only works to turn on the water. And school officials said a plumber with a wrench and some basic know-how can’t perform a relatively simple fix-up job there either.
Instead, turning off the water means asking a staff member to pull a lever in a different room. Or hiring a contractor to tear down the shower walls and replace the aging plumbing infrastructure.
“Can we get someone to turn those off?” Saginaw Township Community Schools Superintendent Jamie Kraatz asks Brian Blaine, the school’s principal, when she hears the empty showers running from the hallway outside.
The often-running shower water at Heritage High is a microcosm of the infrastructure challenge presented to staff and students at both the school and the district’s other seven facilities, where school leaders say bills will accumulate in cost the longer deeply-rooted problems go unfixed.
The fix, they argue, is a $169.2 million school bond question voters will weigh during a Tuesday, Nov. 4, election. Some voters already have cast absentee ballots that will decide the fate of the tax proposal.
It’s a proposal district leaders say will update safety and security systems as well as classroom technology while applying infrastructure makeovers at the school buildings and athletics facilities that serve about 4,500 students.
“We’re talking about updates and security measures that make our buildings appropriate for today’s world,” Kraatz says. “These are big projects. We need these projects done yesterday. We can’t just kick these problems down the road.”
It wasn’t yesterday — but it also wasn’t so long ago — when voters overwhelmingly rejected an earlier school bond proposal for the district. In May 2023, a $242.9 million bond proposal fell short by a vote of 8,671 to 2,540.
Kraatz was not the district’s superintendent during that failed campaign — the then-director of learning, curriculum and assessment replaced Superintendent Bruce Martin in January 2024 — but she says today’s bond advocates learned lessons from the 2023 election.
The result: District leaders scaled back their financial ask by about 30% — or $73.7 million less — compared to the 2023 proposal.
“The main difference is that, in the first ask, the idea was to rebuild Heritage High School, and that came with a very large price tag,” Kraatz says. “This time, we’re talking about renovating versus rebuilding. We’re to the point now where renovation is necessary, especially when you look at our needs assessment versus just doing what we can with what we have.”
The new proposal would invest the largest share of costs into updating Heritage High, which would receive $67.6 million in updates if the bond passes, district records show.
White Pine Middle School would receive $34.2 million; Sherwood Elementary School, $18.6 million; Arrowwood Elementary School, $13.2 million; Weiss Elementary School, $11.5 million; Hemmeter Elementary School, $9.7 million; Westdale Elementary School, $9.3 million; and Mackinaw High School, $5.3 million.
Some of those facilities were built in an era when officials were more concerned about nuclear missile strikes than mass shootings. The youngest district building, Heritage High, was constructed 54 years ago. The oldest, Hemmeter Elementary, opened one year before Japan invaded Pearl Harbor.
The proposed renovations to several of those facilities include infrastructure changes meant to provide security against modern threats, officials say.
Some of the elementary schools, for example, still feature “open-concept classroom” designs from the mid-20th century, decades before school-shooter lockdown drills were part of the student experience.
The proposed bond would involve renovations to eliminate those old designs in favor of adding levels of security typical in new school building designs, Kraatz says.
“These buildings were just built in a different time,” she says, “when safety concerns were very different than they are today.”
Those proposed changes also would impact studies, bond advocates say. Eliminating the open-space designs would create quiet, focused spaces for students to concentrate on class lessons.
“The bleed-over of sound right now is troublesome for a teaching environment,” said Michael Waldie, the district’s finance director. “When you’re in Arrowwood, walking down the hallway, there’s one teacher teaching in a class with an open wall, and then next to that, there’s another teacher in a class with an open wall.”
The proposed bond also would include renovations or additions to facilities including air conditioning and heating systems, bathrooms and locker rooms, classroom technology, and athletics playing fields.
The details are spelled out on the district’s website, where the bond proposal’s plans and cost estimates are available in line-item specificity. Videos on the website provide virtual tours of the schools, detailing the structural challenges and the proposed solutions.
“It’s all right there,” said Lori Puckett, the district’s communications specialist. “We’ve put it all out there for people to see.”
The detail is meant both for voters considering their decision as well as critics of the proposal.
As was the case two years ago, the 2025 bond also has served as the focus of a campaign to persuade voters to defeat the ask. A website, taxhike.org, outlines the case against the bond.
Critics have argued the school bond presents too high of a tax burden for too long of a period for the township’s residents and businesses. They also have argued the district offers misleading information about the cost of the proposal and that school leaders should have placed the item in front of voters during an election when a higher voter turnout was expected.
Kraatz said the choice to seek the bond proposal now largely was centered on both urgent facilities needs and worries that renovation costs will skyrocket, creating pricier problems to solve later.
A closer look at the numbers
So, what would the 25-year tax cost?
The ballot language states the proposal would amount to a 5.21-mill tax annually on average between 2026 and 2052, district records state.
The proposed tax would begin in 2026 at a rate of 3.95 mills. That means a homeowner living in a house with a $50,000 taxable value would pay $160.50 to support the proposed bond next year.
But district officials point out the life of the proposed bond would begin as earlier-approved township school bond taxes decline and then expire in three years.
Their mathematical pitch to voters: When computing future household tax debt, consider the sunsetting taxes rather than combining those existing costs with the proposed tax.
District records show the rate for the proposed bond tax would reach a height of 5.35 mills annually from 2028-40, which would result in a $267.50 tax bill yearly for a homeowner living in a house with a $50,000 taxable value.
By comparison, that same homeowner will pay $125 this year for school bond debt that will no longer exist by 2028. That would amount to a $142.50 increase when comparing the potential 2028 tax bill to the 2025 tax bill.