By LYNN GOEBEL and WILLIAM WALKER

On Feb. 11, voters in Oak Harbor School District will decide, as we do every four years, whether excellence in education is still worth the price.

Is it?

Why dig so deep for all that money? Aren’t many of us struggling to pay our bills already? What about taxpayers who don’t have kids in our schools? Why pay to educate someone else’s children?

The answers are all around us, in the faces and lives of every member of our community. Every single one of us. Not just the ones we think of first when we talk of schools. Of course, our children need this levy, from angelic kindergartners to fresh high school graduates.

But local businesses need our schools too, if they expect to recruit the best and brightest to serve us. Business owners and professionals invest their time, money, and talents in communities with the best schools. And that provides the best job opportunities here, not just for new graduates but for all of us.

Our friends and family at Naval Air Station Whidbey need our schools. Whidbey sailors, who serve our nation with honor and loyalty, have eared the right to know their children are receiving a top notch education in return.

And don’t we all sleep easier at night knowing our first responders, many of whom were born and raised right here on Whidbey Island, got the best possible start in our schools?

Put simply, excellent schools provide us all with an excellent quality of life. Excellent schools weave themselves into our very identity. As Superintendent Michelle Kuss-Cybula likes to say, “we’re all Wildcats here,” and not just when we rally around local sports teams. We’re Wildcats when we enjoy exceptional music, art, and cultural events. We’re Wildcats when we cheer our graduates as they step up and make a difference in our community.

That excellent quality of life draws many of our adult former students back home to our island too, after they roam beyond the bridge to explore college and careers. Some even return to teach in these same schools, because fully funded schools, in communities that value them, attract the best educators.

The voters of Oak Harbor have long supported our schools by consistently voting “YES” for local levy funding. These local dollars are essential for covering the gaps left by state funding for “basic” education and for providing programs and opportunities the community values. So the February vote is to continue current funding – it’s not a new tax – and to continue providing excellence here in our beloved island community, beyond the “basic.”

That means we’ll be able to keep enriching our students’ lives to allow them, each of them, to be anything but basic. It means advanced placement classes, special education, paraeducators, and counselors. It means continually updated safety, security, and technology systems. It means full-time nurses, and an OHPD resource officer in our schools. And it means our students’ experiences are enriched through sports, art, music, and more opportunities for them to follow their interests and be inspired as well-rounded citizens.

As citizens, we lean hard on local leaders to provide us with safe streets, clean water and reasonable laws. It takes leaders who leverage their intelligence, education and dedicated hearts to serve us and make that happen. Don’t we want those leaders to have the tools to give us their best effort? Don’t we want to give tomorrow’s leaders every possible chance to develop those tools? Those leaders of the future are counting on us, today, to do what’s right to make them successful a generation from now.

Where does it leave our community, years down the road, if we don’t provide our future leaders an excellent education today?

An educated community is a healthier, safer, happier community. Please vote YES on Feb. 11. Because, yes, it is still worth the price.

To learn more about the levy, including particulars of where the dollars will be spent, please visit www.ohsd.net/levy.

Lynn Goebel is the president of the Oak Harbor School Board. William Walker writes a monthly column for the News-Times, “Take a Breath,” on finding common ground in polarized times.