Putting a $495 million bond package up to voters in North East Independent School District this November — after going 10 years without a single bond election — was not a spur of the moment decision for Superintendent Sean Maika.

It was a yearlong process, he said, sparked by a 2021 incident in which the district spent $2 million replacing an R-22 chiller at Madison High School. That kind of chiller became obsolete in 2010, and Maika became superintendent at the NEISD in 2019.

“I really started to ask a lot of questions” after the chiller incident, Maika said. “How didn’t we know this needed to be done? I don’t like unexpected surprises.”

To understand exactly what the school district facility needs were, NEISD hired government contractor Gordian and put together a steering committee of

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